Abstract

One field of investigation that has recently attracted the interest of a large portion of the experimental psychological community is that related to the human limits that are manifest when neurologically intact adults perform in temporally overlapping tasks. This multi-tasking logic is implemented in the so-called rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm. In this paradigm, two target elements are embedded within a stream of successive distractors, and subjects are instructed to identify both of them. Under these circumstances, one of the two targets (termed, T1 and T2) is missed. Specifically, when the stimulus onset asynchrony (or SOA) between T1 and T2 is shorter than 500-600 ms, subjects often fail to identify T2. This phenomenon is known as Attentional Blink (AB). The present review will try to provide a thorough overview of the findings in the AB field of investigation, and a scheme to classify the different theoretical proposals put forth in the last two decades to explain the AB and AB-related phenomena.