Evidence against a central bottleneck during the attentional blink: multiple channels for configural and featural processing

When a visual target is identified, there is a period of several hundred milliseconds when the processing of subsequent targets is impaired, a phenomenon labeled the attentional blink (AB). The emerging consensus is that the identification of a visual target temporarily occupies a limited attentional resource that is essential for all visual perception. The present results challenge this view. With the same digit discrimination task that impaired subsequent letter discrimination for several hundred milliseconds, we found no disruption of subsequent face discrimination. These results suggest that all stimuli do not compete for access to a single resource for visual perception. We propose a multi-channel account of interference in the AB paradigm.