Perceiving novel objects: The effect of learning on repetition blindness

Abstract

Repetition blindness (RB) refers to the failure in detecting the second occurrence of a repeated stimulus when a series of stimuli are presented in rapid succession. For familiar objects, RB is observed even if stimuli differ across orientations, suggesting RB must involve some view-invariant source. Here, we probed the source of RB in object perception by testing changes in RB across orientations before and after training using novel objects. In the RB task, novel object streams were presented under a RSVP paradigm and contained either repeated or non-repeated objects with varying orientation differences. Observers were asked to judge whether they saw a repeated item in the stream or not. In a second object discrimination task, two different or identical objects were presented in separate intervals and observers were asked to discriminate whether the objects were the same or different. Participants (N = 14) were tested on both tasks before and after training. Results indicated significant RB for novel objects across orientations even before training. Training reduced the overall magnitude of RB uniformly across orientations. These findings support a view-invariant source of RB, which has a locus earlier than object recognition, perhaps at the stage of featural processing and organization.