Abstract: Two experiments were carried out to explore repetition blindness and related mechanisms. In Experiment 1 , subjects were asked to judge whether or not two rapidly and sequentially presented Chinese characters involved one or two animal characters. When the display rate was 70ms per item, longer response times were found in the repeated-character condition relative to the unrepeated condition, whereasa reversed pattem was found whem the display rate was 200ms per item .The same procedure and materials were adopted in Expedient 2 with a fixed display rate (i. e., 70ms per item). The task was to decide whether or not the second character in each sequence represented an animal . The repetition blindness pattem was not found, but a repetition priming trend was shown. The results collectively indicate that both display duration and task are important determinants of repetition blindness. Implications of the present methodology and results on the processing of repeatedly presented stimuli are also discussed.

Key words: Repetition blindness, repetition priming, visual cognition, visual processing