Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When two orthographically siniilar words are briefly and successively displayed, the second word is often difficult to detect or recall, a deficit known as repetition blindness, or RB (Kanwisher, 1987). Two experiments used word-nonword pairs to test predictions of a computational model based on similarity inhibition (Bavelier & Jordan, 1992) vs. predictions of a sublexical model (Harris & Morris, 1996, 1997; Moms & Harris, 1997). One striking finding was of strong RB even for a single repeated letter (cope carn; hot hix). Results generally supported a sublexical model where only the shared letters are affected by RB, and each shared letter can be differentially affected in a probabilistic manner.