Cross-task repetition amnesia: Impaired recall of RSVP targets held in memory for a secondary task

People often fail to select and encode the second of two targets presented within less than 500ms in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), an effect known as the attentional blink. We investigated how report of the two targets is affected when one of them is maintained in working memory for a secondary, memory-search task. The results showed that report of either target was impaired when it was a member of the memory set relative to when it was not. This effect was independent of both the temporal interval separating the RSVP target from the presentation of the memory set and the interval separating the targets. We propose that the deficit in recall occurs because the association between a target and the memory-search task interferes with the formation of a new association between that target and the following RSVP task, with the result that observers may be biased to ascribe the target only to the memory set.