EARLY BRAIN POTENTIALS LINK REPETITION BLINDNESS, PRIMING AND NOVELTYDETECTION

To study mechanisms of visual object identification in humans, event-r elated potentials (ERPs) were recorded during successful or unsuccessf ul identification of rapid, serially presented words (unrepeated or re peated). We observed 'repetition blindness' (RE): more repeated than u nrepeated words were incorrectly reported. ERPs from repetition-blinde d words exhibited little or none of the enhanced positivity found for correctly reported repeated words, resembling instead ERPs from any un repeated sequence initially, but only incorrectly reported unrepeated sequences later. Thus it appears that in RE an early (220 ms) neural o peration that normally initiates facilitated processing from immediate repetition priming erroneously processes a repeated item as novel. Th is operation (possibly in basotemporal neocortex) appears to induce di fferential subsequent processing of novel vs repeated information.