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Attentional control and competition between episodic representations

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Abstract

The relationship between attentional control and episodic representation was investigated in six experiments that employed a variant of the classic attentional blink paradigm. We introduced a task-irrelevant (unpredictive) color match between the first and second target stimulus in a three-stream rapid serial visual presentation task. When this match was present, the first target reliably elicited a priming benefit to the identification of the second, lateralized target. However, this was only the case when the identities of the targets did not belong to the same category (digits, letters, or symbols). When targets did belong to the same category, interference was observed instead of priming, particularly at Lag 1. Furthermore, when color was the target-defining feature, interference at Lag 1 gave way to priming at longer lags. The interference effect is attributed to partial overlap between competing episodic target representations, which affects the availability of their overlapping features for successive attentional selection in rapid serial visual presentation.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the excellence cluster “Cognition for Technical Systems” (CoTeSys), project #148. The authors would like to thank Ali Abedian-Amiri, Jelena Pobrić, Carmen de Weerd, and Lea Wicke for their help with data collection, and Brad Wyble for valuable comments on an earlier draft.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany

    Elkan G. Akyürek & Anna Schubö

  2. Department of Psychology, Experimental Psychology, University of Groningen, Grote Kruisstraat 2/1, 9712 TS, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Elkan G. Akyürek

  3. Philipps University, Marburg, Germany

    Anna Schubö

  4. Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Bernhard Hommel

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  1. Elkan G. Akyürek
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  2. Anna Schubö
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Correspondence to Elkan G. Akyürek.

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Akyürek, E.G., Schubö, A. & Hommel, B. Attentional control and competition between episodic representations. Psychological Research 77, 492–507 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-012-0445-9

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