The Attentional Blink provides Episodic Distinctiveness: Sparing at a Cost

The Attentional Blink (Raymond et al 1992) refers to a surprising temporal gap in our ability to see a target if it follows a prior target. Theoretical and computational work has provided a variety of explanations for the blink, but more recent data have challenged these accounts by showing the blink is strongly attenuated when subjects encode entire strings of targets (Nieuwenstein & Potter, 2006, Olivers et al 2007, Kawahara et al 2007) or are distracted (Olivers & Nieuwenstein 2005). In this paper, we describe the Episodic Simultaneous Type Serial Token (eSTST) model of encoding items into working memory as visual tokens. This model is composed of neurobiologically plausible neural elements and suggests that the attentional blink is the result of a mechanism that creates episodically distinct representations within working memory. The model also addresses the phenomenon of repetition blindness and whole report superiority, producing predictions which are supported by experimental work.