Effect of pattern complexity on the visual span for Chinese and alphabet characters

Wang, Hui; He, Xuanzi; Legge, Gordon E.

doi:10.1167/14.8.6

Cited by 51 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…This finding agrees with a recent report by Wang, He, and Legge (2014) that the visual span in Chinese extends up to 6.7 characters. There are four major differences from the original experiment by Inhoff and Liu (1998).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 94%

Perceptual span depends on font size during the reading of Chinese sentences.

Yan¹,

Zhou²,

Shu³

et al. 2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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The present study explored the perceptual span (i.e., the physical extent of an area from which useful visual information is extracted during a single fixation) during the reading of Chinese sentences in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, we tested whether the rightward span can go beyond 3 characters when visually similar masks were used. Results showed that Chinese readers needed at least 4 characters to the right of fixation to maintain a normal reading behavior when visually similar masks were used and when characters were displayed in small fonts, indicating that the span is dynamically influenced by masking materials. In Experiments 2 and 3, we asked whether the perceptual span varies as a function of font size in spaced (German) and unspaced (Chinese) scripts. Results clearly suggest perceptual span depends on font size in Chinese, but we failed to find such evidence for German. We propose that the perceptual span in Chinese is flexible; it is strongly constrained by its language-specific properties such as high information density and lack of word spacing. Implications for saccade-target selection during the reading of Chinese sentences are discussed.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 94%

Perceptual span depends on font size during the reading of Chinese sentences.

Yan¹,

Zhou²,

Shu³

et al. 2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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show abstract

“…As mentioned earlier, the accuracy of recognition of the letter that is closest to fixation or the fovea (referred to as the inner letter), is usually much lower than the letter that is furthest from fixation (referred to as the outer letter) 2, 7, 14. The results presented in Fig.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

“…Manipulating the report condition enables an investigation of the effect of memory load on letter recognition accuracy. This study employed the partial and complete report methods 14 . With complete report all 3 or 5 characters were reported (in sequence) whereas in the partial report condition only a single pre-cued letter was reported.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of letter string length and report condition on letter recognition accuracy

Raghunandan¹,

Karmazinaite²,

Rossow³

2017

Journal of Optometry

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PurposeLetter sequence recognition accuracy has been postulated to be limited primarily by low-level visual factors. The influence of high level factors such as visual memory (load and decay) has been largely overlooked. This study provides insight into the role of these factors by investigating the interaction between letter sequence recognition accuracy, letter string length and report condition.MethodsLetter sequence recognition accuracy for trigrams and pentagrams were measured in 10 adult subjects for two report conditions. In the complete report condition subjects reported all 3 or all 5 letters comprising trigrams and pentagrams, respectively. In the partial report condition, subjects reported only a single letter in the trigram or pentagram. Letters were presented for 100 ms and rendered in high contrast, using black lowercase Courier font that subtended 0.4° at the fixation distance of 0.57 m.ResultsLetter sequence recognition accuracy was consistently higher for trigrams compared to pentagrams especially for letter positions away from fixation. While partial report increased recognition accuracy in both string length conditions, the effect was larger for pentagrams, and most evident for the final letter positions within trigrams and pentagrams. The effect of partial report on recognition accuracy for the final letter positions increased as eccentricity increased away from fixation, and was independent of the inner/outer position of a letter.ConclusionsHigher-level visual memory functions (memory load and decay) play a role in letter sequence recognition accuracy. There is also suggestion of additional delays imposed on memory encoding by crowded letter elements.

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“…Therefore, it is possible that Pelli et al's finding regarding complexity was partially due to the effect of the size of the word composed by several characters on readability. This possibility is supported by a recent study showing that complexity affects the size of the visual span for characters in text like groups (Wang, He, & Legge, 2014). They found that crowding was the dominant factor limiting the size of the visual span, and the amount of crowding increased with complexity.…”

Section: Legibility and Letter Complexitymentioning

confidence: 67%

The Effects of Letter Design Features and Aging on Legibility

Ohyama

Sagawa

2016

Perception

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We examined how letter legibility is affected by letter design features (size, contrast, font-type, and complexity), and how this changes with age (by comparing younger [N = 54] and older participants [N = 54]). Types of letters in the study were Japanese characters, Latin alphabets, and digits. Participants verbally reported the letter presented on a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) display in natural viewing conditions. The legible-contrast threshold was calculated as the contrast boundary of 50% correct answer. We found that letter complexity (i.e., number of strokes) did not affect legible contrast threshold, except for small (<0.35°) letters. Moreover, letter size even affected the threshold with a function similar but not identical to contrast sensitivity function. This supports the previous hypothesis proposed by Majaj et al. that optimal spatial frequency band exists for letter identification and shifts with its size. Another novel finding was the effect of aging on the legible-contrast threshold and how it related to other letter features. Constant aging effect on legible-contrast was found across letter sizes. Among older adults, the legible-contrast thresholds were 1.2 to 2 times those of younger adults. Moreover, the aging effects were greater for positive-contrast than for negative.

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Effect of pattern complexity on the visual span for Chinese and alphabet characters

Cited by 51 publications

References 32 publications

Perceptual span depends on font size during the reading of Chinese sentences.

Perceptual span depends on font size during the reading of Chinese sentences.

The effect of letter string length and report condition on letter recognition accuracy

The Effects of Letter Design Features and Aging on Legibility

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