ИСТИНА

The role of top-down influences on the temporal characteristics of visual attention under dual-task RSVP conditions as manifested in the attentional blink (AB) phenomenon was investigated. The AB was hypothesized to be due to the structure of the observer’s perceptual activity under given conditions and therefore modulable through the change of its units’ size. This was achieved by presenting to-be-reported stimuli as a single word in an RSVP stream letter by letter, with a separate task concerning the 1 st letter of the word. Words could be read in two different ways: a letter either within or out of the AB temporal interval, functionally equivalent to a probe in the standard AB procedure, could be skipped, so that another word with a different meaning would be read. The analysis of results revealed no standard AB while reading whole words, but a slight attenuation of performance through all lags and a more pronounced attenuation shifted to the end of the mean word-stem. Most significantly, the effect of binding of 1 st and 2 nd tasks within the same word had lasting effects on how observers coped with the AB under more typical conditions.