Queries on qualified table name performs better than unqualified tablename

I have a discovered a problem with a query against a local table and am trying to understand why it behaves this way.

I am logged into the schema and querying a table in the schema. Nothing fancy going on here. But look at the difference in the response times of the query if I qualify the table name with the schema name compared to the query without the qualifying schema name. For some reason non-qualified references force physical reads. (Note that the "recipientemail" column is indexed).

scott@DEV> select * from scott.recipient where recipientemail = 'x';

no rows selected

Elapsed: 00:00:00.17