Figure 4.

Schematic demonstration of the competitive regulation of attention for a single letter target among a series of distractors, (top), three targets in a row (middle) and two targets separated by a distractor (bottom). The height of the blue line corresponds to the amount of attention deployed at a particular moment. Attention begins at a baseline level and can be shifted upwards or downwards depending on whether excitation from targets or suppression from ongoing encoding is dominating the competition. For three targets in a row, the suppression elicited from the first target onwards is counteracted by the amplified excitation from T2 and T3. However an intervening distractor provides sufficient time for attention to be suppressed, producing an attentional blink for the following target.