REPETITION BLINDNESS UNDER MINIMUM MEMORY LOAD - EFFECTS OF SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL PROXIMITY AND THE ENCODING EFFECTIVENESS OF THE FIRST ITEM

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.