The attentional blink (AB) phenomenon refers to the failure to report the second target (T2) if it appears 200-500 ms after the first target (T1) in a stream of rapidly presented images. The present study aimed to investigate the neural representations of target processing under conditions where AB does or does not occur. We recorded EEG and behavioral data while participants viewed a rapid sequence of natural object images embedded with two face targets presented at two lag conditions: lag 3 (targets were 252 ms apart) and lag 7 (targets were 588 ms apart). Consistent with AB, our behavioral results showed a lower T2 identification accuracy in lag 3 compared to lag 7. We then used multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) of EEG data to extract the neural dynamics of target processing over time. Comparing the neural representations of targets in the two lag conditions, we found that T1 processing coincided with T2 processing, resulting in suppressed T1 and T2 late representations in lag 3, where AB happened, but not in lag 7, where there was enough time between the two targets. Our results also indicated that target representations were different between participants with a strong AB effect (blinkers) and those with a weak AB effect (non-blinkers). These findings carry significant implications for theories of attentional blink, highlighting the need for their extension in order to account for naturalistic paradigms and new findings
