The attentional blink: A relational accountof attentional engagement

Visual attention allows selecting relevant information from cluttered visual scenes and is largely determined by our ability to tune or bias visual attention to goal-relevant objects. Originally, it was believed that this top-down bias operates on the specific feature values of objects (e.g., tuning attention to orange). However, subsequent studies showed that attention is tuned to in a context-dependent manner to the relative feature of a sought-after object (e.g., the reddest or yellowest item), which drives covert attention and eye movements in visual search. However, the evidence for the corresponding relational account is still limited to the orienting of spatial attention. The present study tested whether the relational account can be extended to explain attentional engagement and specifically, the attentional blink (AB) in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. In two blocked conditions, observers had to identify an orange target letter that could be either redder or yellower than the other letters in the stream. In line with previous work, a target-matching (orange) distractor presented prior to the target produced a robust AB. Extending on prior work, we found an equally large AB in response to relatively matching distractors that matched only the relative color of the target (i.e., red or yellow; depending on whether the target was redder or yellower). Unrelated distractors mostly failed to produce a significant AB. These results closely match previous findings assessing spatial attention and show that the relational account can be extended to attentional engagement and selection of continuously attended objects in time.