Repetition blindness for rotated objects: Influence of object coherency

Abstract

Repetition blindness (RB) is the finding that the repetition of an item within a rapid visual stream is often missed. Previous research has shown that RB is reduced for small (0º) and large (180º) rotations of an object between presentations, relative to intermediate rotations (e.g., Hayward et al., 2007; Kanwisher et al., 1999). In the present experiment, we investigated the effect of object coherency on RB for rotated objects. When an object image was split vertically or horizontally, breaking the holistic coherence of the object, modulations of RB across viewpoint were eliminated and it was completely viewpoint invariant. These findings suggest that RB is due mainly to the activation of object representations from local diagnostic features, but can be modulated by priming on the basis of view similarity.