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Increasing the duration of an intervening distractor word can increase repetition blindness: Evidence for interitem competition in rapid visual sequences.

In rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), accurate report of a critical item (C2) declines when an earlier critical item (C1) is identical rather than unrelated. The most prominent theories of this phenomenon of repetition blindness (RB) concern the effects of processing C1 on later processing of C2. However, characteristics of distractor items between C1 and C2 strongly moderate RB, suggesting that items may compete for registration as separate events. We investigated interitem competition by manipulating the word frequency of distractors and C2s, and introducing novel manipulations of C1 and distractor duration. The frequency manipulations affected overall performance but not the size of RB; C2 reporting accuracy improved when distractors were of higher frequency and, contrary to typical results in lexical tasks, when C2s were of lower frequency. These results align with a competition model in which lower frequency words have an advantage. C1 duration had no significant effects on performance. A new finding was that increasing distractor duration had no main effect on performance but did increase the size of RB. The difficulty of registering a repeated C2 in memory under time pressure is exacerbated by the competitive effects of a temporally adjacent word of longer duration. The findings add to other evidence that interitem competition is important in RB and in processing of rapid visual sequences more generally. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).