Abstract
Jacoby and Dallas (1981) were the first to label the perceptual enhancement of a stimulus due to a prior presentation as “relative perceptual fluency.” Our earlier work (Marohn & Hochhaus, in press) demonstrated that consecutive repetition priming and consecutive semantic priming have different effects on perceptual fluency, wherein repetition priming causes a phenomenon we call “perceptual blindness,” in which the subject fails to perceive the second presentation. Is this failure simply a result of the exact physical repetition of the priming stimulus? The present experiment was a follow-up study designed to ascertain what effect a change in letter case format would have on the perceptual fluency of the repeated target word. Repetition in a different letter case showed that this “cognitive refractoriness” generalizes to different test conditions and goes beyond the physical features of the letters to the word as a whole unit.
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This research was supported in part by a grant from Oklahoma State University to the second author.
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Marohn, K.M., Hochhaus, L. Different-case repetition still leads to perceptual blindness. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 26, 29–31 (1988). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334851
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334851