The effects of acoustic mismatch and selective listening on repetition deafness

Previous research (i,e,, M. Miller & D. O. MacKay, 1994, 1996) has suggeste d that repetition deafness (RD), like repetition blindness, is robust to ph ysical identity and that it consists in a failure to recall specifically th e 2nd of the 2 critical targets (C1 and C2). However, some confounds due to memory load and response biases make available evidence inconclusive. Expe riment 1 provided a strong test of RD between physically mismatching stimul i using a low memory load methodology. In Experiment 2, the same presentati on method was combined with a selective recall task to find that RD is spec ific of C2. Experiments 3A and 3B showed, through an attentional manipulati on, that RD is eliminated when people can successfully ignore C1 but not ot herwise. It is argued that present data favor a perceptual interpretation o f the RD. Furthermore, the present results support the hypothesis of recogn ition failure as opposed to the alternative token individuation failure hyp othesis.