The attentional blink across stimulus modalities: Evidence for central processing limitations

When participants are asked to report a visual target and find a subsequent visual probe, a deficit in probe report accuracy is usually found during an interval of several hundred milliseconds after the target, This attentional blink (AB) deficit has often been attributed to a uniquely visual limitation. In this research, targets and probes were created and de fined in terms of auditory information. Target modality (visual or auditory) was fully crossed with probe modality (visual or auditory). In Experiment 1, a robust AB, found in all modality conditions, was equally large for cross-modality and within-modality target and probe combinations. Experiments 2 and 3 ruled out two alternative explanations for cross-modal blinks. Experiment 4 showed that as the rate of presentation was slowed, the AB for auditory probes attenuated more quickly than for visual probes. Results are discussed in terms of a central (amodal) limitation of attention.