Abstract
The repetition blindness (RB) and repetition deafness (RD) effects demonstrate that repeated objects are more difficult to notice than unrepeated ones when presented within rapid streams of stimuli. Previous research has shown that RB can occur even if two visual targets are similar but not completely identical. In the present study we investigated RD for similar non-identical auditory targets. In Experiment 1 we compared recall performance for similar target pairs to that for identical target pairs and found that the difference (the RD) was significantly smaller than when comparing recall performance for unrelated target pairs to that for identical target pairs. In Experiment 2 we presented similar, identical and unrelated target pairs in a within-participants design and confirmed that RD occurs for similar targets but to a lesser extent than it does for identical targets. In both experiments, the influence of response biases and lexical competition effects were minimized so as to render the explanation of the results clear in terms of pure perceptual processes. The data reported here support models that predict perceptual RB and RD between similar items, as opposed to other accounts that predict RB and RD only for items sharing the same identity