When visual marking meets the attentional blink: More evidence for top-down limited capacity inhibition

An attentional blink (AB) paradigm was used to investigate the attentional resources necessary for visual marking. The results showed that distractors presented inside the AB cannot easily be ignored despite participants anticipating a future target display. This supports the hypothesis that attentional resources are required for visual marking. In addition, probe dots were better detected on blinked distractors than on successfully ignored distractors, but only when the task required new items to be prioritized. In a final expriment, a stronger negative carry-over effect on search occurred for targets identical to distractors presented outside rather than inside the AB. This suggests that at least part of the inhibitory processes involved in visual marking are nonspatial.