Determinants of repetition blindness.

Repetition blindness (RB) for letters presented in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) was shown to be highly dependent on absolute stimulus presentation rate (Experiment 1) and on the duration of the 2nd occurrence (C2) but not the 1st occurrence (C1) of the repeated item (Experiment 2). In Experiments 3-6, RB was strongly affected by C1-C2 interstimulus interval but not by response requirements or total memory load. In Experiment 7, sensitivity for detection of the 2nd vowel in an RSVP sequence of consonants was lower when it was identical to the 1st vowel (mean d' = .40) than when it was different (mean d' = .70). It is argued that RB is not due to (a) temporal overlap of C1 and C2 recognition, (b) forgetting of C2, (c) item-specific output interference, (d) response bias, or (e) guessing strategies; rather, RB arises because of the failure to bind recognized types to individuated tokens.