Are individual or consecutive letters the unit affected by repetition blindness?

When 2 similar words (e.g., react reach) are briefly sequentially displayed , the 2nd word may be omitted from the report, a phenomenon known as repeti tion blindness (RB). Previous researchers have suggested that consecutive l etters are the unit affected by RB. Six experiments provided new data on or thographic RB. Two letters at the beginning or end of words resulted in RB, as did alternating interior letters (tactile earthly) and 3 letters with d ifferent relative positions (arid bird). However, no RB was found with a si ngle final letter (show view). Observed RB may reflect pattern completion b ecause RB for pairs like throat theory was reduced when the nonrepeated let ters (eory) were consistent with only a single word. The experiments point to a model of orthographic RB in which both individual letters and letter s equences of length 2 or more play a role.