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.