Orthographic repetition blindness

Repetition blindness (RB) is the failure to report the second occurrence of a repeated word, when words are sequentially and briefly displayed (Kanwisher, 1987). RB is also observed for non-identical words, such as home, dome. Explanations for non-identity RB assume that similarity at the level of the whole word causes the second word to be suppressed ("similarity inhibition"). Three experiments demonstrate that RB is robust for diverse types of orthographic relatedness, including critical words that share only their first initial letter, their last two letters, first three letters, middle three letters, beginning and final letters, three alternating letters, and three non-aligned letters (as in chance hand). The theoretical construct of similarity inhibition may be able to account for these data, although one mechanism previously proposed in the literature, neighbourhood inhibition, is probably not a useful way to explain the data on RB for words sharing only one or two letters. We introduce an alternative explanation for orthographic RB: Only the repeated letters are suppressed, and amount of RB depends on how easily the perceiver can reconstruct the target word from the non-suppressed letters.