Temporal inhibition in character identification

Abstract

Modelsof information processing tasks such as character identification often do not consider the nature of the initial sensory representation from which task-relevant information is extracted. An important component of this representation is temporal inhibition, in which the response to a stimulus may inhibit, or in some cases facilitate, processing of subsequent stimuli. Three experiments demonstrate the existence of temporal inhibitory processes in information processing tasks such as character identification and digit recall. An existing information processing model is extended to account for these effects, based in part on models from the detection literature. These experiments also discriminate between candidate neural mechanisms of the temporal inhibition. Implications for the transient deficit theory of dyslexia are discussed.Despite the fact that we see the world as a continuous stream of visual stimulation, the input to the eyes consists of discrete quantal events. No two photons arrive at exactly the same time, anda visual system that reported the locations of arriving photons with infinite temporal fidelity would simply report a flurry of pinpoints, each representing one photon capture. In order to provide a coherent representation ofa scene, the visual system must integrate information over some interval to temporally group photons coming from the same object. To quantify the notion of an integration interval, the response to a stimulus may be characterized as a temporal waveform that represents the result of temporally grouping the arriving photons to form some response that varies over time. Upon stimulus onset, this response may rise to some level and then decay sometime after stimulus offset. This response is termed the initial sensory response and is assumed to represent the output of neural mechanisms located early on in the visual stream (e.g., the retina and the primary visual cortex). It has long been known that the response to a stimulus outlasts its offset (see Coltheart, 1980, for an excellent review), and the characteristics of this initial sensory response reflect this fact. All subsequent visual processing is based on this initial representation, and thus the first step in characterizing the mechanisms that underlie object or character identification must address the nature of this initial sensory representation.The nature of this sensory response function has previously been shown to be important for models of detection (Sperling & Sondhi, 1968;Watson, 1986), intensityduration tradeoffs in information processing tasks (Loftus & Ruthruff, 1994), metacontrast masking (Breitmeyer, This research was funded in part by an NIMH predoctoral grant to T.A.B. and NINH Grant MH4l637 to Geoffrey R. Loftus. Portions of this research were in partial fulfillment of a doctoral dissertation at the University of Washington. Correspondence should be addressed to T. A. Busey, Department of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 (e-mail: busey@indiana.edu). & Irwin, 1998), synchrony judgment...

Recognition of letters displayed as briefly flashed dot patterns

“…Stimulus information was integrated only under limited task conditions (Brockmole et al 2002;Jiang et al 2005). Busey (1998) provided quantitative modeling of inhibitory interactions with successive displays of digits, and Forget et al (2010) found competition in the perception of trigrams.…”

Binocular information acquisition and visual memory.

“…The impulse response function used in the present work (Equation 1) is monophasic and therefore does not allow for temporal inhibition. Busey (1994) found weak evidence for temporal inhibition in digit identification tasks, and when the theory was modified to include temporal inhibition (via a biphasic impulse response function setting s > 0 in Equation 1) it successfully accounted for the data in these related tasks. However, application of this biphasic model to the present data did not markedly improve the fit over that provided by the monophasic model that we have described (despite two additional free parameters).…”

“…Identification data for letter stimuli such as those used in the present study are often modeled by setting s to 0 (Busey, 1994), which gives a monotonic impulse response function g ( t ) as shown by the solid curve in the left panel of Figure 2. An alternative way of representing the same information is by taking the Fourier transform of the impulse response function g ( t ), which results in a temporal contrast sensitivity function (TCSF).…”

Promoting Wayang Kulit as a Media in Internalizing Islamic Values

“…Understanding of characters of wayang kulit is kind of identification human life. It is sort of the initial sensory representation and describing how its properties can affect performance in information processing task such as character recognition for the role model (Busey, 1998(Busey, : 1285. which a collective's morality is deposited (Musschenga & Meynen, 2015: 3).…”