Abstract
Mizuno & Matsui (2007) indicated that the difficulty of attention-switching might be a cause of attentional blink (AB) by showing that the report rate of the second targets correlated with simple RT reflecting the difficulty of attention-switching from the first targets to the second. Matsui & Mizuno (2006) found in another experiment that the effect of the difficulty of attention-switching was not found under a between-block design but under a usual within-block design. Therefore, this study replicated the within-block experiment in Mizuno & Matsui (2007) using the between-block design to explore the effect of the difficulty of attention-switching on AB and simple RT and their relationship free from its effect. The results showed that AB decreased extremely but not completely, and that report rate correlated negatively with simple RT. These results suggest that the difficulty of attention-switching has a large effect on AB, but that it is not a unique factor.
