Resource sharing in the attentional blink

Abstract

Humans have difficulty processing more than one event at a time, as is evidenced by the attentional blink ('blink') phenomenon: the second of two targets in a visual stream of events cannot be reported accurately if it appears between 100 and 500 ms after the first. By using whole-head magnetoencephalography, we show that the probability of behaviourally failing to correctly identify the second target can be predicted from the amount of attentional resources devoted to processing the first target, as indexed by T1 activation. This important finding supports resource sharing accounts of divided attention tasks such as the 'blink'; that is, such tasks may reflect an individual processing strategy rather than an immutable structural processing bottleneck.