TYPES AND TOKENS UNSCATHED - A REPLY

N. G. Kanwisher (1987; J. Park & N. G. Kanwisher, 1994) has explained repetition blindness in terms of a distinction in visual perception between type activation and token individuation; repeated items are successfully recognized (matched to stored types) but are less likely than unrepeated items to become individuated as separate perceptual tokens. Whittlesea and colleagues (B. W. A. Whittlesea, M. D. Dorken, & K. W. Podrouzek, 1995; B. W. A. Whittlesea & K. W. Podrouzek, 1995) argued that repetition blindness does not reflect different processing of repeated and unrepeated items but is better explained as the result of a combination of separate but nondistinctive processing of repeated items and postlist report biases. However, we argue that none of the results reported by Whittlesea and colleagues are inconsistent with the token-individuation hypothesis.