Proactive Control of Selective Attention: Endogenous Cueing Effects in a Two-target Attentional Blink Task

Abstract

Our study investigated the effect of preparatory selective attention on encoding two target items (T1 and T2), causing an attentional blink effect (AB), as observed in previous studies. We altered participants' readiness state on a trial-to-trial basis using informative or uninformative cues for selective attention. Additionally, we varied their overall state of readiness by randomly mixing cue types (mixed cue-context) or presenting them in separate blocks (blocked cue- context). Our findings demonstrated a clear advantage in performance when participants received informative cues compared to uninformative ones in the mixed cue-condition, regardless of the lag between T1 and T2. Notably, in the blocked cue-context condition, cueing benefits were limited to the shortest T1-T2 lag. This suggests that participants proactively prepared to focus on T1 when anticipating conflict, but the extent of this preparation varied between cue-contexts. A heightened state of preparation led to an overinvestment of resources to T1 encoding, which negatively affected T2 encoding.