Using target-distractor discriminability to examine specific task strategies in repetition blindness

Abstract

Repetition Blindness (RB) refers to a reduced performance in reporting repeated items in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream. Whether the size of RB is influenced by using targets and distractors of different categories (e.g., digits versus letters) has been a controversial issue in recent years. In this study, we investigated the effect of categorical discriminability on RB, by asking participants to either report the targets or to detect repetition. In Experiment 1, targets were letters and distractors were digits. Significant RB was found in the detection task, but priming was found in the report task. In Experiment 2, distractors were collections of letter segments, which rendered targets less discriminable from the distractors. RB was still found in the detection task, but unlike Experiment 1 no priming was found in the report task. Comparing the two experiments, categorical discriminability had an effect on performance in the report task, but not in the detection task. This result suggests that different strategies may be involved across tasks, so that target-distractor discriminability influences RB differently in the two tasks.