P. Downing et N. Kanwisher, TYPES AND TOKENS UNSCATHED - A REPLY, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 21(6), 1995, pp. 1698-1702
N. G. Kanwisher (1987; J. Park & N. G. Kanwisher, 1994) has explained
repetition blindness in terms of a distinction in visual perception be
tween type activation and token individuation; repeated items are succ
essfully recognized (matched to stored types) but are less likely than
unrepeated items to become individuated as separate perceptual tokens
. Whittlesea and colleagues (B. W. A. Whittlesea, M. D. Dorken, & K. W
. Podrouzek, 1995; B. W. A. Whittlesea & K. W. Podrouzek, 1995) argued
that repetition blindness does not reflect different processing of re
peated and unrepeated items but is better explained as the result of a
combination of separate but nondistinctive processing of repeated ite
ms and postlist report biases. However, we argue that none of the resu
lts reported by Whittlesea and colleagues are inconsistent with the to
ken-individuation hypothesis.