An inhibition effect in the temporal constrains of attentional selection: the Backward Blink

The study aims at investigating the dynamics of visual information processing during sequential control of attentional selection. By combining two different traditional paradigms we show for the first time that during rapid selection of visual targets, encoding of a new target stimulus is facilitated by suppression of the preceding relevant stimulus category (Backward Blink; BB). Such inhibition would operate to reduce interference from previously stored information, in order to facilitate the instantiation of a new attentional episode. Results suggest that the same underlying inhibitory mechanism might contribute to two different attentional effects, specifically, the switch cost and the Attentional Blink, suggesting a general inhibitory mechanism of attentional control, with broad implications for understanding how the brain perceives any task-relevant stimulus.