Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Repetition blindness (RB) usually refers to the inability to detect or recall a repeated item as opposed to an unrepeated item in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). Using a category counting task (i.e., to count how many times a given category appears in an RSVP list). Experiment 1 found RB for repeated Chinese characters in RSVP lists. In Experiment 2, subjects were required to respond only to the second occurrence of a given category in RSVP lists. RB occurred under the fast display rate (117ms/item) but not under the slow rate (200ms/item). Moreover, longer response latencies were found in the repeated condition relative to the unrepeated condition under the fast rate, whereas a reverse pattern was shown under the slow rate. Implications of the present methodology and findings on the processing of repeatedly presented stimuli are discussed in the paper.