Repetition blindness (RB) is the failure to detect and report a repeated item during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). The RB literature reveals consistent and robust RB for word stimuli, but somewhat variable RB effects for pictorial stimuli. We directly compared RB for object pictures and their word labels, using exactly the same procedure in the same participants. Experiment 1 used a large pool of stimuli that only occurred once during the experiment and found significant RB for words, but significant repetition facilitation for pictures. These differential repetition effects were replicated when the task required participants to only report the last item of the stream. Experiment 2 used a small pool of stimuli presented several times throughout the experiment. Significant RB was found for both words and pictures, although it was more pronounced for words. These findings present a challenge to the token individuation hypothesis (Kanwisher, Cognition, 27, 117–143, 1987) and suggest that RB is more likely to be due to a difficulty in establishing a robust type representation. We propose that an experimental context that contains high levels of overlap in visual features (e.g., letters in the case of words, visual fragments in the case of repeatedly presented pictures) may prevent the formation of distinct object-level episodic representations, resulting in RB.

重复失明 (RB) 是指在快速序列视觉呈现 (RSVP) 期间未能检测和报告重复项目。RB 文献揭示了文字刺激的一致且稳健的 RB，但图片刺激的 RB 效果有些变化。我们在相同的参与者中使用完全相同的程序，直接比较了 RB 的对象图片及其单词标签。实验 1 使用了大量在实验期间只发生过一次的刺激，发现单词的 RB 显着，但图片的重复促进显着。当任务要求参与者只报告流的最后一项时，这些不同的重复效应就会被复制。实验 2 使用了在整个实验中多次呈现的一小部分刺激。在文字和图片中都发现了显着的 RB，虽然它在单词上更明显。这些发现对代币个性化假设提出了挑战（Kanwisher，Cognition, 27, 117–143, 1987) 并认为 RB 更有可能是由于难以建立稳健的类型表示。我们提出，在视觉特征中包含高度重叠的实验上下文（例如，单词中的字母，重复呈现的图片中的视觉片段）可能会阻止形成不同的对象级情节表示，从而导致 RB .