ANGRY FACES AND THE ATTENTIONAL BLINK 1345 The main RSVP task consisted of one block of 10 practice trials and six blocks of 106 test trials (i.e., 636 test trials in total, which were presented in a single session). Test trials consisted of 156 (25%) single-target trials and 480 (75%) double-target trials. At the beginning of each trial a small circle was presented for 214 ms at the central fixation point. On double-target trials, after the central fixation stimulus, the stimulus events were as follows: an initial sequence of distractor stimuli (ranging from 4 to 8 consecutive stimuli on each trial), the first target (T1), another sequence of distractor stimuli (between 0 and 8 stimuli), the second target (T2), and then the remaining distractor stimuli (between 2 and 13 stimuli; see Figure 2). After each RSVP stream, participants were required to make two consecutive responses to indicate (i) whether one or two face stimuli had been presented (by pressing buttons labelled 1 or 2) and (ii) the emotional expression of the last face viewed (by pressing buttons labelled A, H or N to indicate whether the last face was angry, happy or neutral). Thus, participants were asked to detect T1, but not to identify its emotional content (N.B. semantic identification of T1 is not necessary to reveal the AB; Barnard et al., 2005). The double-target trials of primary interest were those in which the T1 was a neutral face (either neutral1 or neutral2), and the T2 was a threat, positive or neutral face. This resulted in three main trial types (i.e., three levels of the within-subject independent variable of Trial Type), which depended on the emotional content of the T2: 1. Neutral T1 threat T2 (threat trials); 2. Neutral T1 positive T2 (positive trials); and 3. Neutral T1 neutral T2 (neutral trials). On each trial, T1 and T2 were always different stimuli; i.e., if T1 was neutral2, T2 was neutral1, or vice-versa. For each of these three main trial types, the number of intervening distractors between T1 and T2 varied; so that, on each trial, there could be none, one, two, three, four, five, seven or eight intervening distractor items between T1 and T2. The primary conditions of relevance to the hypothesis were those in which there was at least one intervening distractor between T1 and T2.1 These seven conditions represented differing levels of the within- subjects independent variable of Lag position (where ‘‘lag’’ refers to the serial 1 The condition in which there was no distractor between T1 and T2 was not included in the analyses because the AB effect is often not found in this position (so-called ‘‘Lag-1 sparing’’) and there is evidence that different mechanisms are responsible for Lag-1 sparing and the AB effect (Chun & Potter, 1995; Hommel & Akyurek, 2005; Shapiro et al., 1997a). As the aim of the study was to investigate the effect of emotional information on the AB, the main hypothesis concerned identification of T2 faces during the time window of the AB (i.e., 200 400 ms following T1) versus after the AB ( 500 ms after T1).