Temporal Expectation of First Target and the Attentional Blink: Asymmetric Costs of Timing Violations and Bidirectional Interference

Abstract

The Attentional Blink (AB) refers to the failure in identifying the second target (T2) when it follows the first target (T1) within a 200- 500 ms window. While classical models explain AB as a structural bottleneck, recent disruption- engagement theory suggests a reflection of a delay in attentional enagagement, implying that the gate to awareness may be strategically permeable. The study investigated whether temporal expectations of T1 onset can proactively tune this gating mechanism, affecting the AB. A series of RSVP experiments was conducted, manipulating Temporal Expectation (Expected, Early Violation, Late Violation) within Explicit and Implicit groups, and were compared with a Control group across three Lags (Lag 1, 3, 6). The results found that explicit expectation of the auditory cue-target relationship in the Expected condition significantly attenuated the AB. Notably, within-subjects analysis revealed a pattern of directional asymmetry in AB performance, where Late Violations intensified the blink while Early Violations did not differ from the Expected or Late Violation conditions. Further between-subjects comparisons revealed a significant difference of only the Expected condition from the Control group, suggesting the power of explicit expectations in attenuating AB. Conversely, the absence of such modulation in the Implicit group suggests the insufficiency of statistical regularities in yielding the benefits of temporal expectation and the requirement of top-down awareness. Crucially, raw T1 accuracy in the Explicit group revealed a Bidirectional Interference effect. This discovery of a "T2 to T1" interference challenges nearly every existing AB theory, from Bottleneck to Resource-Depletion models, suggesting that the attentional gate is managed by a competitive, global system that can prioritise future events over current ones.