Attentional awakening, resource allocation and the focus of temporal attention.

Attentional awakening (AA) is an impairment in the identification of target stimuli that are presented early in a rapidly presented sequence of visual stimuli. Here we investigate whether AA is related to resource allocation, measured as amplitude of the P3 event-related potential and/or variance in the focus of temporal attention, measured as P3 phase distribution. We observed a relationship between P3 amplitude and AA that depended strongly on targets' a posteriori probabilities. Evidence was found for a link between performance and P3 phase distributions, but a relationship between AA and P3 phase distributions was not evident. These findings suggest that resource allocation is a relevant factor for AA whereas the variance in the focus of temporal attention contributes only little to AA.