Morin Olivier
Minds and Tradition Research Group, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
Cogn Sci. 2018 Mar;42(2):664-677. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12550. Epub 2017 Oct 10.
Cultural forms are constrained by cognitive biases, and writing is thought to have evolved to fit basic visual preferences, but little is known about the history and mechanisms of that evolution. Cognitive constraints have been documented for the topology of script features, but not for their orientation. Orientation anisotropy in human vision, as revealed by the oblique effect, suggests that cardinal (vertical and horizontal) orientations, being easier to process, should be overrepresented in letters. As this study of 116 scripts shows, the orientation of strokes inside written characters massively favors cardinal directions, and it is organized in such a way as to make letter recognition easier: Cardinal and oblique strokes tend not to mix, and mirror symmetry is anisotropic, favoring vertical over horizontal symmetry. Phylogenetic analyses and recently invented scripts show that cultural evolution over the last three millennia cannot be the sole cause of these effects.
文化形式受到认知偏差的限制，书写被认为是为了适应基本的视觉偏好而演变的，但人们对这种演变的历史和机制知之甚少。认知限制已被记录在文字特征的拓扑结构中，但未涉及它们的方向。如倾斜效应所揭示的，人类视觉中的方向各向异性表明，主要（垂直和水平）方向由于更容易处理，应该在字母中占主导地位。正如这项对116种文字的研究所显示的，书写字符内部笔画的方向在很大程度上偏向主要方向，并且其组织方式使得字母识别更容易：主要笔画和倾斜笔画往往不会混合，镜像对称是各向异性的，垂直对称比水平对称更受青睐。系统发育分析和最近发明的文字表明，过去三千年的文化演变不可能是这些效应的唯一原因。
