One of the most notable aspects of the long-term suppression is that it follows a time course similar to that of other rapid serial visual presentation phenomena, specifically repetition blindness (Kanwisher,
1987) and the attentional blink (Raymond et al.,
1992), both of which are held to result from higher-level processing. Kanwisher (
1987) suggested that repetition blindness is a failure to recognize individual targets as separate episodes. The attentional blink is thought to be a result of interference with a following target by its predecessor, although there is no comprehensive account (Dux & Marois,
2009). Until recently repetition blindness and the attentional blink were thought to be limited to complex stimuli such as words (Kanwisher,
1987), letters (Raymond et al.,
1992), and concepts (Dux & Coltheart,
2005). We have shown recently, however, that there is a failure to detect a grating when it is preceded by another grating of the same orientation, and the time course of this loss peaks at 100–200 ms (Wong, Roeber, & Freeman,
2010). That result, along with the present one, suggests that the origins of the failure to detect repeated stimuli may be in primary visual cortex, where orientation and direction selectivity arise. The low level loss could then propagate, and possibly amplify, as it passes to those higher cortical levels where words, letters, and semantics are processed.