Parameterizing the attentional blink effect.
The attentional blink effect (AB) is used to examine the limits of attention in dual-task paradigms. However, since the effect is nonlinear, it is sometimes difficult to characterize the results. Furthermore, it is difficult to assess the significance of the effect between groups because the results are highly variable both within and across subjects. In this paper, we propose a method to quantify four characteristics of the AB curve: the minimum performance, the amplitude between the minimum and the asymptotic performance, the amount of Lag-1 sparing, and the width of the effect. The method, based on curve fitting, allows easier comparisons of the results across experiments, can test only one characteristic at a time, and yields more powerful statistical tests.