A Study On Repetition Blindness For Chinese Characters

Many studies have been done on repetition priming for Chinese characters, but few studies have been conducted on repetition blindness (RB), a phenomenon which is the failure to detect or recall the repetition item in rapid serial visual presentation. In this study, Chinese character identification was investigated in a new way. With the increase in information and its presentation rate, the presentation of information isn't limited to books or other printed materials. So it is important to carry out a research on Repetition Blindness in rapid serial visual presentation.Under basis of analysis of previous Repetition Blindness studies for English words, the purpose of study was to investigate the determinants of Repetition Blindness, including presentation duration, lag, spatial separation, episodic distinctiveness and way of report for two critical items. Consequently, it would make a contribution to better understanding mechanism of RB, which was a perceptual phenomenon or memory phenomenon? This study also examed whether there was RB between two visually similar Chinese character pairs, between two homophone Chinese character pairs. The research on levels of processing in RB would help us find the unit of processing Chinese characters. The whole study was composed of three experiments, Experiment 1: "Effects of presentation duration, lag and episodic distinctiveness of two critical items on Repetition Blindness", Experiment 2: "Repetition Blindness for two repetition Chinese characters, two visiually similar Chinese characters and two homophone Chinese characters in the condition of report the second critical item". Experiment 3: "The effect of location on Repetition Blindness for two repetition Chinese characters, two visiually similar Chinese characters and two homophone Chinese characters".The main results suggested:(1) There was repetition blindness of Chinese charcters in RSVP. The effect of repetition blindness was smaller than that of English materials, the major reason might be that the processing and representation for Chinese characters are different from English words.(2) The effect of repetition blindness decreased with presentation duration from 50ms to 100ms. It also decreased, even disappeared, with the increase in lag. When items were presented on different locations, repetition blindness only occured between two visually similar Chinese characters.(3) There was repetition blindness between two repetition Chinese character pairs, between two visually similar Chinese character pairs and between two homophone Chinese character pairs. The identification of Chinese characters is based on its visual shapes, but the identification of English words is based on its pronunciation.(4) The effect of repetition blindness decreased by enhancing episodic distinctiveness. The effect of repetition blindness didn't decrease in the condition of report the second item. These results supported the token individuation hypothesis supposed by Kanwisher.