Perception, attention and short-term memory: * auditory attentional blink to study temporal attention and investigate hearing

The AB occurs when two targets are to be identified among distractors in a rapid serial auditory (or visual) presentation stream. In this situation, correct identification of the first target (target) may produce a deficit in processing the second target (probe), and this effect lasts several hundred milliseconds. In previous studies, the auditory attentional blink mainly concerned the influence of bottom –up factors (e.g., SOA and effects of distractors). At present, we investigate the influence of top-down factors on the auditory AB in order to further discover the nature of the auditory AB.