Temporal and spatial repetition blindness: Effects of presentation mode and repetition lag on the perception of repeated items.

Abstract

In this study, participants were asked to identify briefly presented 5-letter (Experiments 1-3) or 2-letter (Experiment 4) strings. Identical items in a repeated trial were identified worse than their counterparts in a nonrepeated trial, indicating repetition blindness (RB; N. G. Kanwisher, 1987). In Experiment 1, RB occurred regardless of whether items were presented successively or simultaneously. In Experiments 2-4, RB occurred regardless of whether 2 simultaneously presented items were spatially close or far apart. The magnitude of RB, however, varied with presentation mode and repetition lag: RB was smaller in simultaneous than successive presentation, and RB increased and then decreased with the number of items separating 2 identical ones. These results provide important constraints in the interpretation of RB. A model that attributes RB to the refractoriness of perceptual recognition units is proposed.

Categorical information influences conscious perception: An interaction between object-substitution masking and repetition blindness

“…For example, the system recognises that the word Bcat^was presented but fails to individuate the two separate presentations. While other explanations for RB have been suggested, such as typenode refractory period (Luo & Caramazza, 1996), and response-level and memory-based explanations (Fagot & Pashler, 1995), these have since been refuted (Chun & Cavanagh, 1997;Kanwisher, Kim, & Wickens, 1996), and thus the type-token individuation failure remains the prevailing explanation.…”

“…Error bars depict standard error of the mean corrected for within-subjects designs (Cousineau, 2005) 1989; Luo & Caramazza, 1996). RB has been documented with a range of stimuli, including letters, words, and pictures (Bavelier, 1994;Egeth & Santee, 1981;Kanwisher, 1991;Luo & Caramazza, 1996;Marohn & Hochhaus, 1988). RB is not limited to physically identical stimuli but also occurs for stimuli that belong to the same category but are visually dissimilar (e.g., A and a, or the word Bcat^and a picture of a cat) (Bavelier, 1994;Egeth & Santee, 1981;Marohn & Hochhaus, 1988).…”

“…2 Masking magnitude (the difference in accuracy between simultaneous and delayed mask offset conditions) for each of the inducer condition in Experiment 1. Error bars depict standard error of the mean corrected for within-subjects designs (Cousineau, 2005) 1989; Luo & Caramazza, 1996). RB has been documented with a range of stimuli, including letters, words, and pictures (Bavelier, 1994;Egeth & Santee, 1981;Kanwisher, 1991;Luo & Caramazza, 1996;Marohn & Hochhaus, 1988).…”

Identity and similarity factors in repetition blindness: implications for lexical processing

“…However, if the contrasting temporal patterns of performance deficit for the two sets of items were to be 1 The monotonically decreasing RB effect as a function of lag obtained in RSVP experiments is not obtained in brief-spatial-visual presentation (BSVP) conditions. In the latter case, RB first increases and then decreases with increases in lag (Luo and Caramazza, 1996). Since the present experiments used the RSVP paradigm, we will not pursue these differences in results.…”

“…One explanation proposed by Bavelier and Jordan (1993) is that R2 fails to be recognized because of the temporary increase in the recognition threshold that follows recognition of R1: the close temporal proximity of R2 to R1 prevents the recognition threshold from getting reset to a sufficiently small value to allow a second detection. Alternatively, it can be thought that after recognition of R1 there is a phase of negative activation, such that activation from R2 fails to reach recognition threshold (Luo and Caramazza, 1996). In either case, the consequence is a refractory period during which a type node is hyposensitive.…”