The Attentional Blink

When you're still processing one target, a second target arriving a fraction of a second later can slip past you completely unseen — even though nothing was physically hidden. This simulator recreates the classic Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm used to study the attentional blink: a stream of distractor items flies past the camera, carrying two targets, T1 and T2, separated by a controllable lag. A parametric "attentional gate" model — grounded in the resource-depletion account of the blink (Raymond, Shapiro & Arnell, 1992; Chun & Potter, 1995) — governs the probability of correctly reporting T2 given T1 was seen, complete with the well-documented dip around 200–500 ms and the lag-1 sparing exception. Run single trials to watch the stream and the live gate value, or batch 50 trials at once to watch the empirical accuracy bars converge on the theoretical curve.