Bernard Jean-Baptiste, Arunkumar Amit, Chung Susana T L
School of Optometry, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-2020, United States.
Vision Res. 2012 Aug 1;66:17-25. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2012.06.012. Epub 2012 Jun 28.
In a previous study, Chung, Legge, and Cheung (2004) showed that training using repeated presentation of trigrams (sequences of three random letters) resulted in an increase in the size of the visual span (number of letters recognized in a glance) and reading speed in the normal periphery. In this study, we asked whether we could optimize the benefit of trigram training on reading speed by using trigrams more specific to the reading task (i.e., trigrams frequently used in the English language) and presenting them according to their frequencies of occurrence in normal English usage and observers' performance. Averaged across seven observers, our training paradigm (4 days of training) increased the size of the visual span by 6.44 bits, with an accompanied 63.6% increase in the maximum reading speed, compared with the values before training. However, these benefits were not statistically different from those of Chung, Legge, and Cheung (2004) using a random-trigram training paradigm. Our findings confirm the possibility of increasing the size of the visual span and reading speed in the normal periphery with perceptual learning, and suggest that the benefits of training on letter recognition and maximum reading speed may not be linked to the types of letter strings presented during training.
在之前的一项研究中，钟、莱格和张（2004年）表明，使用重复呈现三字组（三个随机字母的序列）进行训练，会使正常视野范围内的视觉广度（一眼能识别的字母数量）和阅读速度增加。在本研究中，我们探讨了能否通过使用更特定于阅读任务的三字组（即英语中常用的三字组），并根据它们在正常英语用法中的出现频率以及观察者的表现来呈现这些三字组，从而优化三字组训练对阅读速度的益处。在七名观察者中进行平均，我们的训练范式（4天的训练）使视觉广度增加了6.44比特，与训练前相比，最大阅读速度同时提高了63.6%。然而，这些益处与钟、莱格和张（2004年）使用随机三字组训练范式所得到的结果在统计学上并无差异。我们的研究结果证实了通过知觉学习增加正常视野范围内视觉广度和阅读速度的可能性，并表明训练对字母识别和最大阅读速度的益处可能与训练期间呈现的字母串类型无关。
