• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.603-625
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• 2010

Neural representation of a visual object is distributed across visual cortex and overlapped with those of many other objects. Thus repeating an object facilitates the recognition of the object while it impairs the recognition of other objects. These effects are called repetition priming and antipriming, respectively. Two experiments investigated a new phenomenon of repetition antipriming, in which a repeated object itself is antiprimed. The learning stage presented object pictures which were degraded at various levels. Participants determined how recognizable each object was. Then, the test stage presented the intact version of the object pictures and made participants to perform a categorization task. Both Experiment 1 and 2 found that the processing of the objects that had been recognized were facilitated (repetition priming) while the processing of the objects that had been perceptually ambiguous were impaired (repetition antipriming). These findings suggest that experiencing a perceptually ambiguous object might enhance the connection between feature-level representations and multiple object-level representations, which impairs the subsequent recognition of the repeated object.