Specific task strategies affect repetition blindness

Abstract

Repetition Blindness (RB) refers to a cognitive phenomenon in which participants fail to report repeated items in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream. Report and detection are two tasks commonly used to measure RB. Participants are required to report targets in the report tasks, while they are required to detect repetition in the detection task. However, it is unclear whether strategic differences between the two tasks affect RB. In Experiment 1, we measured RB with the two tasks by using two common types of stimuli, letters or words, as the targets, and with symbols as the distractors. A significant RB was found in the detection task, but not in the report task. This surprising result may be due to the order effect of the two tasks. Therefore, we manipulated the order of the two tasks sequentially in Experiment 2 and studied the lag interval between two targets as well. The result was consistent with Experiment 1 in that RB was found in the detection task across 4 lag intervals but priming was found in the report task. Thus, across the two experiments, RB was found more easily in our detection task than in our report task. Therefore, strategic processing in RB may be differentially involved across tasks, and may have stronger effects on report tasks than detection tasks.