Inhibitory effects of repeating color and shape: Inhibition of return or repetition blindness?

There is a current debate regarding whether attention is influenced by stim ulus attributes other than location. The present article replicates and ext ends previous findings that repeating the nonspatial attribute of color lea ds to a delay in target detection (M. B. Law. J. Pratt, & R. A. Abrams, 199 5). Repetition disadvantage effects were found for the stimulus attributes of both color and shape, as well as for location. However, the nonspatial r epetition disadvantage disappeared if the stimuli were presented in periphe ral locations (Experiments 3a, 3b, and 4) or the cue was presented for 50 m s (Experiment 6). Moreover, the magnitude of the repetition disadvantage te nded to decline as the cue-target stimulus-onset asynchrony increased (Expe riments 5a, 5b, and 6). These results suggest that a repetition blindness m echanism may underlie the repetition disadvantage effects of nonspatial fea tures, rather than an inhibition of return mechanism.