The Positive and the Negative Color Repetition Effect

The Positive and the Negative Color Repetition Effect

Five experiments attempt to resolve anomalous results that strongly indicate serial processing of color patches, as compared to prevailing evidence for parallel color processing in visual search tasks. Varying the color of elements in a configuration presented in perceptually-limited viewing conditions, we found a positive color repetition effect (PCRE), that is detection of a target color is better when a noise color is identical to the target color than when it is an alternative target color. The PCRE is obtained only with confugurations whose elements spatially intersect each other, whereas the opposite of the PCRE, that is, a negative color repetition effect (NCRE) is obtained when elements of a color configuration do not intersect. A spatial continuity hypothesis accounted for all color repetition effects, whereas other hypotheses including Kanwisher's(1991) token individuation could not. Our results indicate that as long as spatial interactions among elements of a color configuration are possible, parallel processing is thpical for the color property.