Two faces of the attentional blink: Gradual and discrete loss of perceptual awareness

In a series of experiments, the nature of perceptual awareness during the attentional blink was investigated. Previous work has considered the attentional blink as a discrete, all-or-none phenomenon, indicative for access to conscious awareness. Using continuous report measures in combination with mixture modeling, the current outcomes show that, in fact, the attentional blink can be a gradual phenomenon. The nature of the blink depended on whether targets might compete for the same spatial location or not. Without the possibility of spatial overlap, the attentional blink was of a gradual nature, in which representations of blinked targets were impoverished, but nonetheless approached the actual identity of the target that was presented. Conversely, with spatial overlap, the attentional blink was discrete; no partially correct reports could be made about blinked targets. These two different faces of the attentional blink challenge current accounts of awareness and temporal attention, which do not recognize the critical role of feature-location binding in producing discrete task performance, and consequently cannot explain the existence of gradual awareness, including that of targets subject to the attentional blink.