Repetition blindness is the failure to detect or recall second instances of repeated words presented in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Repetition blindness is robust and has been shown to arise at rapid presentation rates because the second occurrence of a repeated words is frequently recognized as a type but not episodically individuated as a distinct token from the first occurrence. The experiments proposed here address three main questions about REpetition blindness (RB): i) At what locus is processing of the second occurrence of a repeated word blocked?, ii) Does the same processing mechanism underlie both token individuation and feature conjunction?, and iii) Is RB a consequence of the way in which recognized items become stably encoded in STM? These questions will be pursued using both RSVP and simultaneous displays of feature arrays with a variety of tasks such as free recall, repetition detection, numerosity judgements, and partial report of stimulus lists and arrays. Many of the experiments will manipulate repeatedness of target items, predicting in general that items will be harder to report if the stimulus contains another item of the same type, than if it does not (this is the hallmark of RB). Repetition blindness merits study not simply as a curiosity and a counterintuitive phenomenon, but because it demonstrates an important dissociation between the processing of visual types and of visual tokens. Many important but currently unconnected areas of vision research, which deal with the organization of incoming categorical information into episodic frameworks, can be recast in terms of the integration of type and token information. This proposal attempts to show that i) the distinction between type and token processing provides a common conceptual framework in which to consider diverse visual phenomena, and ii) repetition blindness provides an ideal methodologic tool with which to study the interrelations among these phenomena in detail.
