Repetition deficit in rapid-serial-visual-presentation displays: encoding failure or retrieval failure?

The repetition deficit associated with rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) has been explained as a repetition-induced blindness, that is, as a perceptual or encoding failure. The repetition deficit was replicated in a standard free-recall RSVP task, and it was shown that participants were able to report the lost item when they were prompted with a retrieval probe. The authors argue that both copies of the repeated items were available in memory but that they were not accessible for report. Hence, they conclude that the repetition deficit in the RSVP task reflects a retrieval failure, not a perceptual failure.