Inhibitory effects of repeating color and shape: inhibition of return or repetition blindness?

There is a current debate regarding whether attention is influenced by stimulus attributes other than location. The present article replicates and extends previous findings that repeating the nonspatial attribute of color leads to a delay in target detection (M. B. Law, J. Pratt, & R. A. Abrams, 1995). Repetition disadvantage effects were found for the stimulus attributes of both color and shape, as well as for location. However, the nonspatial repetition disadvantage disappeared if the stimuli were presented in peripheral locations (Experiments 3a, 3b, and 4) or the cue was presented for 50 ms (Experiment 6). Moreover, the magnitude of the repetition disadvantage tended to decline as the cue-target stimulus-onset asynchrony increased (Experiments 5a, 5b, and 6). These results suggest that a repetition blindness mechanism may underlie the repetition disadvantage effects of nonspatial features, rather than an inhibition of return mechanism.