Principal Investigator Mary Potter
When the viewer is looking for two targets (such as blue letters) in a sequence of non-targets (such as black numbers) presented at a rate of 10/s, detection of the second target is markedly impaired when it arrives 200-500 ms after the first target, an "attentional blink." Mark Nieuwenstein (a postdoc in the lab) has shown that cuing the onset of the second target (for example, by showing a blue number immediately before a blue letter target) reduces the impairment caused by the attentional blink, overcoming the stickiness of attention to the first target. Ongoing work investigates the nature of this cuing effect. For example, Mark has found that the cuing effect is contingent on attentional set: when the second target can be presented in either red or green, a cue in either color will help the second target, but when the target is always presented in green, only green cues produce a substantial improvement.