Intervening response events between identification targets do not always turn repetition benefits into repetition costs

When there is a relatively long interval between two successive stimuli that must be detected or localized, there are robust processing costs when the stimuli appear at the same location. However, when two successive visual stimuli that must be identified appear at the same location, there are robust same location costs only when the two stimuli differ in their responses; otherwise same location benefits are observed. Two separate frameworks that inhibited attentional orienting and episodic integration, respectively, have been proposed to account for these patterns. Recent findings hint at a possible reconciliation between these frameworks—requiring a response to an event in between two successive visual stimuli may unmask same stimulus and same location costs that are otherwise obscured by episodic integration benefits in identification tasks. We tested this hybrid account by integrating an intervening response event with an identification task that would otherwise generate the boundary between same location benefits and costs. Our results showed that the intervening event did not alter the boundary between location repetition benefits and costs nor did it reliably or unambiguously reverse the common stimulus-response repetition benefit. The findings delimit the usefulness of an intervening event for disrupting episodic integration, suggesting that effects from intervening response events are tenuous. The divide between attention and feature integration accounts is delineated in the context of methodological and empirical considerations.