The Devil Is in The Detail: A Constructionist Account of Repetition Blindness

Whittlesea, Bruce W. A.; Hughes, Alun D.

doi:10.1007/4-431-27431-6_6

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…It also fits with models that assume that masking from the different items in the display causes the repeated item to disappear (e.g., Morris, Still, & Caldwell-Harris, 2009). Finally, it fits with models that assume that the perceptual construction of repeated items is damaged, where construction includes the attachment of an event to its context (e.g., Masson, Caldwell, & Whittlesea, 2000;Whittlesea & Hughes, 2005). Regardless of the specific source that causes the repeated item to disappear, we believe that grouping converts the repeated items into a single perceptual unit, and thereby eliminates the perceptual problem associated with repetition.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 59%

Repetition blindness: The survival of the grouped

Goldfarb

Treisman

2011

Psychon Bull Rev

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The repetition blindness (RB) effect demonstrates that people often fail to detect the second presentation of an identical object (e.g., Kanwisher, 1987). Grouping of identical items is a well-documented perceptual phenomenon, and this grouping generally facilitates perception. These two effects pose a puzzle: RB impairs perception, while perceptual grouping improves it. Here, we combined these two effects and studied how they interact. In a series of three experiments, we presented repeated items in a simultaneous string, while manipulating the organization of the repeated items in groups within a string. We observed an interaction between RB and grouping that we summarize with a rule that we call "the survival of the grouped": In essence, the ability to group repeated elements protects them from RB. These findings are discussed within the framework of the object file theory.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 59%

Repetition blindness: The survival of the grouped

Goldfarb

Treisman

2011

Psychon Bull Rev

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“…As we have shown here, one factor that simplifies repetition detection is knowledge of what will repeat. Another is knowledge of where in the list repetition might occur (Whittlesea & Hughes, in press). Another factor that can help, independent of the other two, is that distractor stimuli all be the same or that they not be familiar units that attract attention (see Experiment 1).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Repetition Blindness in Rapid Lists: Activation and Inhibition Versus Construction and Attribution.

Whittlesea¹,

Masson²

2005

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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The authors examine the repetition blindness effect--the failure to report one of the occurrences of a word presented twice in a rapid list. This phenomenon has been ascribed to inhibitory processes that prevent immediate tokenization of the 2nd occurrence of a repeated word. The authors present several kinds of evidence against that account, including observations that repetition blindness (a) does not occur when repetitions are not embedded in a list of familiar orthographic units, (b) is alleviated by precuing the subject with the identity of the word that may repeat within a rapid list, and (c) can be caused by cues presented after the list, when the opportunity for inhibition has passed. It is proposed that repetition blindness can better be understood through the principles of construction and attribution.

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“…Potter (1993Potter ( , 1999 attributed the processes involved in early access to semantic and syntactic information to a conceptual STM (CSTM) system that yields rapid but transient activation of relevant conceptual information, which persists just long enough for new scenes and sentences to be comprehended or for targets to be selected for attention, depending on the goal. In the case of read- (Whittlesea & Hughes, 2005). The constructionist account therefore locates the loss of a repeated word (from whichever sentence position is least disruptive to meaning) at the same processing stage as construction: As words "come to mind" during perception or for recall, they must be attributed to their having been seen in the sentence.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Repetition blindness in sentence contexts: Not just an attribution?

Bond¹,

Andrews

2008

Memory & Cognition

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Repetition blindness (RB) refers to the failure to report both occurrences of a repeated item in a series of rapidly presented visual stimuli. For instance, the sentence When she spilled the ink there was ink all over, presented word by word at a rate of around 100 msec/word, may be reported as "When she spilled the ink there was all over" (Kanwisher, 1987), even though the sequence is nongrammatical. RB also occurs for repeated items in lists of words and pictures (see Coltheart, 1999, for reviews), but the phenomenon is particularly striking in sentences, where its occurrence generally fails to respect the constraints of coherence or syntax. This has contributed to accounts that locate the phenomenon at the lexical level, rather than at the later stages of memory and recall. In the experiments reported here, novel variations of the standard RB sentence-processing paradigm were used to shed further light on the relative contribution of bottom-up and top-down processes to RB and, more generally, on the role of lexical activation in sentence processing. Kanwisher's (1987) original interpretation of RB drew upon the distinction between types and tokens. Reporting the identity of an item in a stimulus sequence requires not only activation of the existing representation of the item's type representation in memory, but also creation of a token representing the occurrence of that type in the processing episode (Kahneman & Treisman, 1984). For example, the conceptual processing required to build a coherent structure from the words of a sentence requires more than activation of word types in lexical memory; comprehension and recall depend on establishing tokens of these words and the sentential relationships between them in that specific sentence. In this framework, RB is the consequence of a perceptual limitation that impairs the rapid creation of separate tokens for two occurrences of the type. Type-Token Accounts of RBThere are two major variants of this type-token account that propose different sources for RB. According to the type refractoriness hypothesis, RB is due to the activation dynamics of type nodes, rather than to a problem with token formation or binding. The representation of a particular stimulus undergoes a period of reduced sensitivity immediately after firing, by analogy with the refractoriness of neurons. Accordingly, if the stimulus appears twice in close succession, the second occurrence may be unable to increase the node's activation enough to be recognized or induce a response. The second class of models attributes RB to problems in token individuation. Even though the two separate occurrences are both "recognized" at the type level, formation of a second token from a single type is briefly inhibited after the first token is individuated (e.g., Kanwisher, 1987).The type refractoriness hypothesis has been formalized in dynamical models based on a signal detection approach that implement a "rudimentary form of adaptation" (Bavelier & Jordan, 1992, p. 883). Bavelier and Jordan's model assumes that ...

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The Devil Is in The Detail: A Constructionist Account of Repetition Blindness

Cited by 4 publications

References 70 publications

Repetition blindness: The survival of the grouped

Repetition blindness: The survival of the grouped

Repetition Blindness in Rapid Lists: Activation and Inhibition Versus Construction and Attribution.

Repetition blindness in sentence contexts: Not just an attribution?

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