The Effects of repetition on recall of pictured actions

The repetition blindness phenomenon is a robust effect that occurs for a variety of stimuli, including pictures of objects, pictures of faces, words and letters. However, when subjects view pictures depicting actions at rates of about 10 items per second, there is a significant repetition advantage on a recall task. The goal of the experiments reported here is to investigate which components of action photographs affect perception and memory for actions, in particular, the processing of repeated stimuli. In a series of experiments, we manipulated the stimuli to investigate how colour, context and photographic quality affect recall of action and object pictures. Results support the evidence from neuropsychological and psycholinguistic studies indicating that nouns and verbs are processed by differing neural mechanisms and by different cognitive processing systems representing words for objects and actions.