ИСТИНА

Visual events that occur beyond awareness due to the lack of attention (or, at least, do not enter conscious report) can become conscious, when they form a part of a larger whole. This is true for various modifications of the phenomenon known as a word superiority effect (WSE), first described by J.M. Cattell more than a century ago and rediscovered by cognitive psychologists in 1960-es. In our experiments, we studied WSE in a variety of attentional paradigms, including a dual-task rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm with letter-by-letter presentation of Russian words. We have demonstrated that the lack of visual awareness known as an attentional blink, normally observed in this paradigm, disappears for target letter stimuli embedded in words. Using word and nonword strings with instructions "to read words" and "to identify letters", we have also demonstrated that this effect is due to the controlled strategy of word reading rather than to the automatic word processing. Finally, by introducing an extra probe stimulus in letter strings containing words, we have also shown that the attentional blink does not completely disappear but rather shifts towards the end of a to-be-read word as a functional "unit" of visual information processing.