Repetition blindness for words and pictures

Abstract

Repetition blindness (RB) refers to people‘s tendency to omit the second occurrence of a repeated item when recalling lists of briefly presented stimuli. RB has been reported for a variety of stimuli including both words and pictures and has also been claimed to occur between pictures and words that refer to the same concept, suggesting that it taps a conceptual level of representation. This paper reports a series of experiments that compared RB for words and pictures to determine when and how processing of lexical and pictorial stimuli converge on this conceptual level. Separate investigations of RB using only word or picture stimuli revealed much stronger and more robust RB effects for words than pictures. However, an experiment including both stimulus formats showed stronger RB for repeated pictures than for repeated words or cross-format stimuli. The implications of the results for theories of RB and conceptual representation will be discussed.