Visual factors in word perception

Johnston, James C.; McClelland, James L.

doi:10.3758/bf03212406

Cited by 132 publications

(152 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The hypothesis here is that attention is paid to irrelevant, redundant information because doing so somehow facilitates discrimination. This notion has a distinctly counterintuitive flavor, but similar ideas have been advanced in studies on the perception of verbal materials to account for the so-called "word superiority effect" and the "word-letter phenomenon" (Johnston & McClelland, 1973, 1974Reicher, 1969;Wheeler, 1970). According to this hypothesis, the stimuli ( ) and ( ( are somehow more discriminable from each other than the stimuli) and (, even though there is no additional information which makes the stimuli more different in a formal sense.…”

Section: Nature Of the Grouping Processmentioning

confidence: 90%

Grouping by proximity: Selective attention measures

Pomerantz

Schwaitzberg

1975

Perception & Psychophysics

105

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The role of element proximity in perceptual grouping was examined in tasks requmng speeded discrimination of two-element visual patterns. Grouping of two elements was defined as the failure of attention to be focused on one element selectively in filtering tasks where only that one element was relevant to the discrimination. Failure of selective attention was measured by the degree of interference caused by variation of the irrelevant element. Grouping was shown to diminish monotonically as the spacing between two elements was increased. At a given spacing, grouping could be reduced or eliminated by the introduction of a third element into the stimulus field, presumably because the addition of this element triggered a reorganization of the perceptual field into a new grouping structure. Grouping appeared to facilitate performance on condensation tasks requiring distributed attention, to the degree that the condensation tasks were actually easier than the filtering tasks at close proximities. Paradoxically, for some tasks, moving an irrelevant element away from a relevant one actually impaired performance, suggesting that paying attention to irrelevant information could be beneficial. This result, if generalizable, suggests that grouping be conceptualized not as an automatic process under preattentive control but as an optional process under strategic control. This paper is concerned with two aspects of the problem 01 perceptual organization of visual arrays (Wertheimer, 1923). The first is the degree to which perceptual organization is under the control of specitic parameters of the stimulus array, as opposed to cognitive (strategic) factors within the observer. The second is the establishment of experimental measures of organizational processes. This latter issue is much more than simply a methodological one, for in order to measure organization a theory is required that explains just what organization means, and how and where organization enters into the processing of perceptual information.The Gestalt "laws" of course represented an attempt to answer the first question. Certain stimulus variables. some well defined (proximity) and some not so well defined (similarity), can be shown to have clear effects on the wayan observer reports his perception of stimulus arrays. The conclusions one can draw from these demonstrations. as compelling as the perceptual effects may be, are limited, however. to the domain of phenomenology and say little about the underlying processes that shape our perceptual experiences. What is required are performance measures. rather than subjective reports. of perceptual organization. Pomerantz and Garner (1973) argued that if organization is more than an epiphenomenon. there

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Section: Nature Of the Grouping Processmentioning

confidence: 90%

Grouping by proximity: Selective attention measures

Pomerantz

Schwaitzberg

1975

Perception & Psychophysics

105

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“…There are two pieces of evidence in the literature to support our assumption that people construct a separate net to sort letters surrounded by number signs, instead of using their letter nets: (1) Mezrich (1973) states that subjects in his forced choice experiment reported using different strategies to perceive letters in words and to perceive individual letters, and (2) Johnston and McClelland (1973) found that leaving out the number signs and using a white (rather than patterned) mask reverses the word-letter effect.…”

Section: Recognition In Word Context and In Isolationmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…It is our assumption that the effect of the blank mask is simply to reduce the contrast of the icon by summating with it. Thus the limit on performance is not so much the amount of time available in which to process the information as it is the quality of the information made available to the system... (p. 389) Using this explanation their model produces a word-letter effect that is smaller when the letter is surrounded by number signs than the effect in patterned-mask experiments, but larger than the effect in the Johnston and McClelland (1973) experiment.…”

Section: Recognition In Word Context and In Isolationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Context effects in letter perception: Comparison of two theories.

Richman

Simon²

1989

Psychological Review

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This study showed that Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer (EPAM) can explain letter recognition phenomena earlier simulated by the connectionist Interactive Activation Model (IAM) of word perception (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981;Rumelhart & McClelland, 1982). EPAM, a model of learning and recognition in the form of a computer program, has previously successfully explained many aspects of learning and perception in a range of task environments (Feigenbaum & Simon, 1984). This study shows that the human data modeled by the IAM are at least as accurately simulated by EPAM. The fact that one model (EPAM) processes perceptions serially and the other (IAM) processes them in parallel plays no essential role in producing the observed context effects. Both connectionist and serial symbolic simulations can be designed to exhibit these effects.Progress in cognitive psychology in recent years has resulted in the production of a number of rather distinct theories to account for the basic processes of perception and cognition. Before we examine the differences between two of these theories, which is the main task of this article, we need to emphasize what all of the theories have in common.1. They characterize perceptual and cognitive processes as information processes.2. They are computational: They are described with such specificity that they can be, and are, programmed for digital computers. Hence, their predictions can be compared with data at a relatively fine level of concrete detail.3. They are quite general. That is, they model and make predictions for a wide range of perceptual and cognitive performances, not just for performance on one task or a few closely similar tasks.Among the theories that share these characteristics are the connectionist models put forward by Rumelhart (1981, Rumelhart &McClelland, 1982), the Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer (EPAM) theory of Feigenbaum and Simon (1962, 1984), John Anderson's (1983 ACT*, and Rosenbloom and Newell's (1982) SOAR. The first of these models describes thinking without the use of symbols, that is, based on patterns of activation in network-like structures. The other three accept the physical symbol system hypothesis , that intelligence is produced by the processing of symbols in a physical system capable of such processing.Although all four theories have considerable generality, their ranges are not quite coterminous. SOAR makes perhaps the broadest claims to generality, but it has been elaborated mainly

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“…It is indicated that, in the classic word superiority paradigm (Reicher, 1969), bottleneck in word recognition is the retention/memory rather than the visual perception, because, as shown with the partial report technique, subjects can percept 9 -10 letters presented for 4 ms (Kriegman and Biederman, 1980). The word superiority effect is more pronounced by adding a visual mask right after the stimulus presentation (Johnston and McClelland, 1973). One explanation for the mask effect is that a higher-order structure, e.g., phonological and/or semantic, might help to retain the words/ pseudowords but is not available to nonwords.…”

Section: Phonological and Semantic Training And Fusiform Activationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language experience shapes fusiform activation when processing a logographic artificial language: An fMRI training study

et al. 2006

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The significant role of the left midfusiform cortex in reading found in recent neuroimaging studies has led to the visual word form area (VWFA) hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that years of experience reading native language change the visual expertise of this region to be especially sensitive to the visual form of native language. The present study aimed at testing this hypothesis by exploring the role of language experience in shaping the fusiform activation. We designed a logographic artificial language (LAL) using the visual form and pronunciation of Korean Hangul characters (but their correspondence was shuffled) and assigning arbitrary meanings to these characters. Twelve native Chinese Mandarin speakers (6 male and 6 female, 18 to 21 years old) with no prior knowledge of Korean language were trained in the visual form of these characters for 2 weeks, followed by 2 weeks each of phonological and semantic training. Behavioral data indicated that training was effective in increasing the efficiency of visual form processing and establishing the connections among visual form, sounds, and meanings. Imaging data indicated that at the pre-training stage, subjects showed stronger activation in the fusiform regions for LAL than for Chinese across both one-back visual matching task and the passive viewing task. Visual form training significantly decreased the activation of bilateral fusiform cortex and the left inferior occipital cortex, whereas phonological training increased activation in these regions, and the right fusiform remained more active after semantic training. Increased activations after phonological and semantic training were also evident in other regions involved in language processing. These findings thus do not seem to be consistent with the visual-expertise-induced-sensitivity hypothesis about fusiform regions. Instead, our results suggest that visual familiarity, phonological processing, and semantic processing all make significant but different contributions to shaping the fusiform activation. D

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Visual factors in word perception

Cited by 132 publications

References 12 publications

Grouping by proximity: Selective attention measures

Grouping by proximity: Selective attention measures

Context effects in letter perception: Comparison of two theories.

Language experience shapes fusiform activation when processing a logographic artificial language: An fMRI training study

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