Repetition blindness: out of sight or out of mind?
Does repetition blindness represent a failure of perception or of memory? In Experiment 1, participants viewed rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sentences. When critical words (C1 and C2) were orthographically similar, C2 was frequently omitted from serial report; however, repetition priming for C2 on a postsentence lexical decision task was equivalent whether or not C1 was similar to C2. In Experiment 2, participants monitored RSVP sentences for a predetermined target. Participants frequently failed to detect the target when it was preceded by an orthographically similar word. In Experiment 3, the authors investigated the role of the attentional blink in this effect. These experiments suggest that repetition blindness is a failure of conscious perception, consistent with predictions of the token-individuation hypothesis.
Morris
Alison L
AL
Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, Ames 50011-3180, USA. almorris@iastate.edu
Harris
Catherine L
CL
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003657:Decision Making; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D012033:Refractory Period, Psychological; D012660:Semantics; D012691:Serial Learning; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014956:Writing