Watch a rapid stream of letters. Your task: notice the digits.
Each stream contains two digits hidden among the letters. You can almost always catch the first one. But if the second digit appears within roughly 200–500 milliseconds of the first, something happens: it disappears.
Not because it wasn't there. The second digit appeared on screen, the signal reached your visual system — and then it didn't make it through. This gap in conscious access is the attentional blink.
The attentional blink is reliably reproduced across laboratories, but what it demonstrates is contested. The leading account (Chun & Potter 1995, the two-stage model) says T2 enters a first visual processing stage but fails to reach the second stage — working memory consolidation — because that stage is occupied by T1. The blink is a bottleneck at the point of consolidation, not detection. A competing account (Shapiro et al., the interference model) attributes the loss to competition between representations in working memory rather than a serial consolidation queue.
This simulation cannot distinguish between them. Both predict the same behavioral curve — a dip in T2 detection from approximately lag 2 through lag 5, recovering at lag 6 and beyond. The curve alone doesn't decide which account is correct.
The simulation also can't demonstrate lag-1 sparing reliably in a short session. At lag 1, T2 appears immediately after T1 and is often bundled with it during consolidation, escaping the blink. With only 3 trials per lag, the noise is too high to see this effect clearly. The laboratory finding requires many trials averaged across many participants.
Most fundamentally: the simulation shows you what you report, not what you perceived. The gap between perception and report is the subject of another debate entirely.