Other evidence for the presence of N400 semantic priming effects under conditions of reduced awareness comes from the literature on the attentional blink (AB) phenomenon (reviewed in Vogel et al 1998). The attentional blink is a short refractory period occurring about 300–600 ms after the detection of a target item (T1) in a stream of rapidly presented stimuli, during which subsequent targets (T2) are missed. ERP data have bounded the locus of T1-T2 interference as after initial perceptual processing of T2 (as reflected in normal early sensory visual potentials) but prior to the encoding of T2 into working memory (as reflected in elimination of the P3b component). Critically, when semantically related or unrelated word pairs are embedded in the stimulus stream, N400 effects are observed whether T2 is a target (Vogel et al 1998) or a prime (Rolke et al 2001) in the critical AB window. These results from the AB paradigm reveal that words that are attended and perceived – but not identified and encoded into working memory -- can nonetheless have undergone some semantic analysis and, moreover, can
