Modality-specific and amodal sources of interference in the attentional blink

When two masked targets (T1 and T2) are visually or auditorily presented in rapid succession, processing of T1 produces an attentional blink (AB)--that is, a transient impairment of T2 identification. The present study was conducted to compare the relative impact of masking T1 and T2 between vision and audition. Within a rapidly presented sequence, each of the two verbal targets, discriminated by their offset (Experiment 1) or their onset (Experiment 2), could be followed by either a single item, acting as a mask, or a blank gap. Masking of T2 appeared to be necessary for the occurrence of the AB for both the visual and the auditory modality. However, whereas masking of T1 affected the expression of the visual AB in both experiments, the same effect was observed in the auditory modality only when the targets varied at the onset. These results provide further evidence that processing auditory and visual information is restricted by similar attentional limitations but also suggest that these limits are constrained by properties specific to each sensory system.