Repetition blindness with objects having parts deleted and added

Abstract

Repetition blindness (RB) refers to the finding that participants often fail to report a repeated target in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams. An earlier study from our lab (Hayward, Zhou, Man, & Harris, 2010) reported that RB for familiar objects is based upon processing of isolated features. The current study investigates whether RB for objects is affected by addition or deletion of object features. In two experiments RB for familiar objects was studied with the first target being a complete object and the second target having some parts removed or extra parts added (that is, if the first target was a dog, the second target might be half the dog or might be a dog with six legs). While the magnitude of RB was found to decrease as a part of the object was removed, it remained invariant as extra parts were added. These results support the contention that processing of independent object components provides the basis for RB.