Cr. Luo et A. Caramazza, REPETITION BLINDNESS UNDER MINIMUM MEMORY LOAD - EFFECTS OF SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL PROXIMITY AND THE ENCODING EFFECTIVENESS OF THE FIRST ITEM, Perception & psychophysics, 57(7), 1995, pp. 1053-1064
Repetition blindness (RB) refers to the reduced performance in reporti
ng a repeated as opposed to a nonrepeated item in rapid serial visual
presentation. In Experiment 1, we found RE for two-item stimuli in unc
ertain locations. The magnitude of RE decreased significantly with inc
reases in interstimulus interval, but not with increases in spatial se
paration, indicating that RB is determined primarily by temporal facto
rs. In Experiment 2, we found RB when subjects were required to report
only the second of two successively presented items. The magnitude of
RB increased with the duration of the first item, indicating that RB
is determined by the encoding effectiveness of the first item. The res
ults of this study collectively indicate that RE is not a memory or a
sensory phenomenon, but rather a perceptual phenomenon occurring at th
e stage of identity encoding. The findings also undermine the argument
s (Kanwisher, 1987) that have been offered in favor of the type-token
binding failure hypothesis and indicate instead that type-node refract
oriness may be the cause of RB.