Repetition blindness: levels of processing

Repetition blindness (RB) is the failure to detect or recall repetitions of words in rapid serial visual presentation. Experiment 1 showed that synonym pairs are not susceptible to RB. In Experiments 2 and 3, RB was still found when one occurrence of the word was part of a compound noun phrase. In Experiment 4, homonyms produced RB if they were spelled identically (even if pronounced differently) but not if spelled differently and pronounced the same. Similarly spelled but otherwise unrelated word pairs appeared to generate RB (Experiment 5), but Experiment 6 produced an alternative account. Experiments 7 and 8 demonstrated that repeated letters are susceptible to RB only when displayed individually, not as part of two otherwise different words. It is concluded that RB can occur at either an orthographic (possibly morphemic) level or a case-independent letter level, depending on which unit (words or single letters) is the focus of processing.