Repetition blindness

Biological Parallel

Search image formation creates attentional blindness to repeated targets in different contexts. Hawks hunting voles in grassland develop neural templates tuned to 'brown movement in grass'—but fly over identical voles on rocks or snow because the context changed. Toads trained to snap at black beetles ignore white beetles of identical shape and size—repetition of shape doesn't transfer across color change. Archerfish trained to spit at surface insects miss submerged insects of the same species because surface/underwater contexts create separate perceptual categories. The mechanism: pattern recognition binds features into context-dependent chunks. Repeated exposure to 'vole in grass' strengthens that specific template but doesn't generalize to 'vole in snow.' Evolution favored fast, context-specific recognition over slow, context-invariant recognition.