Temporal and Spatial Repetition Blindness: Effects of Presentation Mode and Repetition Lag on the Perception of Repeated Items

In this study, participants were asked to identify briefly presented 5-letter (Experiments 1-3) or 2-letter (Experiment 4) strings. Identical items in a repeated trial were identified worse than their counterparts in a nonrepeated trial, indicating repetition blindness (RB; N. G. Kanwisher, 1987 ). In Experiment 1, RB occurred regardless of whether items were presented successively or simultaneously. In Experiments 2-4, RB occurred regardless of whether 2 simultaneously presented items were spatially close or far apart. The magnitude of RB, however, varied with presentation mode and repetition lag: RB was smaller in simultaneous than successive presentation, and RB increased and then decreased with the number of items separating 2 identical ones. These results provide important constraints in the interpretation of RB. A model that attributes RB to the refractoriness of perceptual recognition units is proposed.