Task relevance modulates the necessity of temporal attention for scene categorization: evidence from attentional blink paradigm

Over the past two decades, many investigators explored the extent to which spatial attention is required for scene categorization and no consistent conclusion was reached. More importantly, no prior studies have systematically examined this issue from the perspective of temporal attention. Using attentional blink (AB) paradigm, the present study investigated the necessity of temporal attention for scene categorization through three experiments where participants categorized one (or two) target scene(s) embedded in distractor streams. In Experiment 1 where both T1 and T2 were task-relevant scenes requiring categorization, we observed a categorical identity advantage effect: T2|T1 accuracy was significantly higher when both scenes shared the same category than they belonged to different categories. Experiment 2 dissociated task relevance between two targets. When only T2 required categorization with high task-relevance of T1 distractors (in Experiment 2a), T1-induced interference magnitude was comparable to that of dual-task condition in Experiment 1. Conversely, when only T1 required categorization with low task-relevance of T2 distractors (in Experiment 2b), which produced weaker interference than both Experiment 1 and 2a. These findings demonstrate that temporal attention allocation in scene categorization depends on task relevance, suggesting dynamic attentional gating mechanisms during rapid scene categorization.