Repetition blindness: perception or memory failure?

Repetition blindness (RB) is the failure to report a repeated item when reporting all of the elements from a rapidly displayed sequence of visually presented items. N. Kanwisher (1987) has characterized RB as a perceptual problem. Experiments 1 and 4 manipulated the order of report of the repeated items. Experiments 2-4 employed tasks other than full report that should still have shown RB according to a perceptual hypothesis, but none was found. In Experiment 5, RB was found when one of the repetitions was spoken and the other was presented visually; this RB could be localized to retrieval processes. RB appears to reflect processes and strategies peculiar to full report from rapid displays rather than any fundamental perceptual limitation and might be the same as the Ranschburg effect found in immediate recall tasks.

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