Training and the attentional blink: limits overcome or expectations raised?

The attentional blink (AB) refers to a deficit in reporting the second of two sequentially presented targets when they are separated by less than 500 ms. Two decades of research has suggested that the AB is a robust phenomenon that is likely attributable to a fundamental limit in sequential object processing. This assumption, however, has recently been undermined by a demonstration that the AB can be eliminated after only a few hundred training trials (Choi, Chang, Shibata, Sasaki, & Watanabe in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109:12242-12247, 2012). In the present work, we examined whether this training benefited performance directly, by eliminating processing limitations as claimed, or indirectly, by creating expectations about when targets would appear. Consistent with the latter option, when temporal expectations were reduced, training-related improvements declined significantly. This suggests that whereas training may ameliorate the AB indirectly, the processing limits evidenced in the AB cannot be directly eliminated by brief exposure to the task.