ERPs & Attention (3)

Question 1

What question did Luck, Vogel and Shapiro (1996) have?

Answer 1

• what is happening at stages of processing when the attentional blink occurs

Question 2

What study did Luck, Vogel and Shapiro (1996) conduct?

Answer 2

• a stream containing a repeated number, context word, probe word and nonwords are rapidly presented
• participants asked if words are related and if the number was even or odd

Question 3

When were the different stimuli presented?

Answer 3

• 20 strings (83 ms each)
• context word presented first
• digits (first target) presented at 7th or 10th string
• probe presented 1, 3, or 7 items after first target (related or unrelated)

Question 4

What were the behavioural results of the study?

Answer 4

• control condition was told to ignore number and had a consistent accuracy
• experimental condition had a large drop in accuracy at lag 3

Question 5

What are the ERP results of the study?

Answer 5

• get larger N400 when they are able to report if words are related or unrelated
• N400 difference waves show that the brain processed the word enough to figure out if the word is related or not (no N400 drop at lag 3)

Question 6

What happens when a simple error is made?

Answer 6

• in the experimental trial, the N400 on error trials was found to significantly larger at lag 3

Question 7

At what stage is the attentional blink happening at?

Answer 7

• must be occuring after N400 since processing at this point indicates that someone would be able to report accurately
• late stage
• not suppression of perceptual processing but post perceptual loss of information

Question 8

What are implications for cognition?

Answer 8

• brain has processed if word is related but cannot report seconds later
• could be individual is not aware
• or individual is aware but awareness is lost before answering the question