To blink or not to blink? The potential for recovery in performance through the attentional boost effect

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether a common attentional deficit, the attentional blink effect, could be reduced through the use of auditory signals to cue the reorienting of attention. In Experiment 1, participants completed a two-target attentional blink task, half of whom heard an auditory tone presented simultaneously with the second of the two target words, whereas the other half did not. The participants had difficulty recalling the second of the two targets, and the presentation of the tone did not reduce this deficit. In Experiment 2, all participants heard tones presented simultaneously with the second target, but half of these participants had the additional task of providing a verbal response when they heard a rare tone frequency. In this case, the additional task of responding to some of the tones did not have the re-orienting effect as expected. Instead, the additional task caused more difficulty recalling the two target words. These findings are evidence of the limitations of the attentional system. overwhelming the attentional system with too many tasks leads to deficits in attention that then has an adverse impact on memory.