The distractor repetition effect in the attentional blink: Inhibition or facilitated ignoring?

It is widely assumed that distractor stimuli in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) are actively inhibited to aid target identification. The attentional blink (AB), a deficit in the identification of a target (T2) when it occurs within several hundred ms of a prior target (T1), is attenuated when the distractor items immediately preceding and following T1 are identical. Previously, this has been interpreted as a reduction of masking due to cumulative inhibition. However, this view sits at odds with evidence in the word identification literature for easier detection of repeated stimuli. Theoretically, a repetition benefit to distractor detection could make a target easier to distinguish from nearby distractors. This ‘facilitated ignoring’ account of the distractor repetition benefit was compared with the inhibition account in a series of experiments. Results indicate greater activation for repeated than non-repeated distractors, which is inconsistent with the inhibition perspective. However, evidence for the connection between a repetition benefit and facilitated ignoring was deficient