Whole Report versus Partial Report in RSVP Sentences.

A sentence is readily understood and recalled when presented 1 word at a time using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at 10 words/s (Potter, 1984). In contrast, selecting just 2 colored letters at 10 letters/s results in easy detection of the first target but poor recall for the second when it appears 200-500 ms later. This attentional blink disappears when all letters must be reported; instead, performance drops more gradually over serial position (Nieuwenstein & Potter, 2006). Would target words in sentences escape an attentional blink? Subjects either reported 2 target words (in red or uppercase) or the whole 10-word sentence. There was a blink for Target 2 in partial report, but that target was easily remembered in whole report. With scrambled sentences whole report dropped but partial report was unaffected, again showing a blink. The attentional blink is not due to memory processing of Target 1, but to target selection, which is incompatible with sentence processing.