Attentional blink for acronyms: Effects of familiarity and pre-exposure

Abstract

Seventy-two university students participated in one of two experiments in the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. Distractors were four-letter non-words, the first target (T1) was a four-letter word, and the second target (T2) was a two–four-letter acronym that followed T1 at lags of 2, 3 and 5 items (Experiment 1) or lags of 3 and 5 items (Experiment 2). Familiar acronyms were identified better than unfamiliar acronyms. One pre-exposure of acronyms in a rating task improved RSVP accuracy for familiar acronyms only (Experiments 1 and 2), whereas three pre-exposures produced a benefit for unfamiliar acronyms and no significant additional benefit for familiar acronyms (Experiment 2). Thus a pre-existing unitised memory representation, and a relatively recent access of this representation, enhanced target identification. The effects of pre-exposure were more consistent with resource depletion than attentional filtering accounts of the attentional blink.

Keywords:

• Acronyms
• attentional blink
• pre-exposure
• RSVP
• word frequency