Mueller Shane T, Weidemann Christoph T
Michigan Technological University, Houghton, 49931, USA.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2012 Jan;139(1):19-37. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.09.014. Epub 2011 Oct 26.
The legibility of the letters in the Latin alphabet has been measured numerous times since the beginning of experimental psychology. To identify the theoretical mechanisms attributed to letter identification, we report a comprehensive review of literature, spanning more than a century. This review revealed that identification accuracy has frequently been attributed to a subset of three common sources: perceivability, bias, and similarity. However, simultaneous estimates of these values have rarely (if ever) been performed. We present the results of two new experiments which allow for the simultaneous estimation of these factors, and examine how the shape of a visual mask impacts each of them, as inferred through a new statistical model. Results showed that the shape and identity of the mask impacted the inferred perceivability, bias, and similarity space of a letter set, but that there were aspects of similarity that were robust to the choice of mask. The results illustrate how the psychological concepts of perceivability, bias, and similarity can be estimated simultaneously, and how each make powerful contributions to visual letter identification.
自实验心理学诞生以来，拉丁字母的易读性已被多次测量。为了确定字母识别背后的理论机制，我们对一个多世纪以来的文献进行了全面综述。该综述表明，识别准确性常常归因于三个常见来源的一个子集：可感知性、偏差和相似性。然而，这些值的同时估计很少（如果有的话）进行过。我们展示了两项新实验的结果，这些实验允许对这些因素进行同时估计，并通过一个新的统计模型来研究视觉掩蔽的形状如何影响其中的每一个因素。结果表明，掩蔽的形状和特性影响了字母集的推断可感知性、偏差和相似性空间，但相似性的某些方面对掩蔽的选择具有鲁棒性。这些结果说明了如何同时估计可感知性、偏差和相似性的心理概念，以及它们各自如何对视觉字母识别做出有力贡献。
