The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human History Are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes

Abstract

Are there empirical regularities in the shapes of letters and other human visual signs, and if so, what are the selection pressures underlying these regularities? To examine this, we determined a wide variety of topologically distinct contour configurations and examined the relative frequency of these configuration types across writing systems, Chinese writing, and nonlinguistic symbols. Our first result is that these three classes of human visual sign possess a similar signature in their configuration distribution, suggesting that there are underlying principles governing the shapes of human visual signs. Second, we provide evidence that the shapes of visual signs are selected to be easily seen at the expense of the motor system. Finally, we provide evidence to support an ecological hypothesis that visual signs have been culturally selected to match the kinds of conglomeration of contours found in natural scenes because that is what we have evolved to be good at visually processing.

Economically organized hierarchies in WordNet and the Oxford English Dictionary

“…Many of our other human inventions have been designed-either explicitly or via cultural selection over time-so as to minimize their demands on the brain. For example, writing and other human visual signs appear to have been optimized by cultural selection for our visual systems (Changizi, 2006(Changizi, , 2009Changizi & Shimojo, 2005;Changizi, Zhang, Ye, & Shimojo, 2006). The definitions in the dictionary are not identical to the meanings of words we have in our heads, missing out, for example, on metaphorical associations that may be part of an individual's meaning of the word (see, e.g., Fillmore, 1975;Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 2003, but it would be surprising if the large-scale organization of the dictionary was not driven in some large part by the organization of our mental lexicon.…”

Statistical regularities of art images and natural scenes: Spectra, sparseness and nonlinearities

“…The fractal dimension is related to the amplitude spectrum and has been shown to be regular for many natural forms (e.g., 1 A similar notion has recently been proposed in relation to human writing systems and natural scenes (Changizi et al 2006). 2 Other studies have used spectra to classify natural scenes, e.g.…”

Recruitment of an Area Involved in Eye Movements During Mental Arithmetic

“…It has therefore been suggested that they co-opt or "recycle" evolutionarily older circuits with a related function (1), thus enriching (without necessarily replacing) their domain of use. For instance, learning to read recruits a left infero-temporal area originally engaged in object recognition, and even the seemingly arbitrary shapes of our letters may originate in a neural repertoire of junctions detectors useful for scene recognition and available to all primates (2). In the case of mathematics, although foundational intuitions such as number sense (3) and spatial maps (4) are present in many animal species and in humans prior to education, mathematical constructions vastly exceed these initial domains of inherited competence.…”