Attentional blink modulation during sustained and after discrete lead stimuli presented in three sensory modalities

Previous studies found larger attentional modulation of acoustic blinks during task-relevant than during task-irrelevant acoustic or visual, but not tactile, lead stimuli. Moreover, blink modulation was larger overall during acoustic lead stimuli. The present experiment investigated whether these results reflect modality specificity of attentional blink modulation or effects of continuous stimulation. Participants performed a discrimination and counting task with acoustic, visual, or tactile lead stimuli. Stimuli were presented sustained or consisted of two short discrete stimuli. The sustained condition replicated previous results. In the discrete condition, blinks were larger during task-relevant than during task-irrelevant stimuli in all groups regardless of lead stimulus modality. Thus, previous results that seemed consistent with modality-specific accounts of attentional blink modulation reflect effects of continuous stimulus input.