Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
PLoS One. 2018 Apr 2;13(4):e0194405. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0194405. eCollection 2018.
The left-side bias (LSB) effect observed in face and expert Chinese character perception is suggested to be an expertise marker for visual object recognition. However, in character perception this effect is limited to characters printed in a familiar font (font-sensitive LSB effect). Here we investigated whether the LSB and font-sensitive LSB effects depend on participants' familiarity with global structure or local component information of the stimuli through examining their transfer effects across simplified and traditional Chinese scripts: the two Chinese scripts share similar overall structures but differ in the visual complexity of local components in general. We found that LSB in expert Chinese character processing could be transferred to the Chinese script that the readers are unfamiliar with. In contrast, the font-sensitive LSB effect did not transfer, and was limited to characters with the visual complexity the readers were most familiar with. These effects suggest that the LSB effect may be generalized to another visual category with similar overall structures; in contrast, effects of within-category variations such as fonts may depend on familiarity with local component information of the stimuli, and thus may be limited to the exemplars of the category that experts are typically exposed to.
在面孔和专家汉字感知中观察到的左侧优势 (LSB) 效应被认为是视觉物体识别的专长标记。然而，在字符感知中，这种效应仅限于用熟悉字体印刷的字符（字体敏感 LSB 效应）。在这里，我们通过检查简化和传统中文脚本之间的转移效应，研究了 LSB 和字体敏感 LSB 效应是否取决于参与者对刺激全局结构或局部成分信息的熟悉程度：这两种中文脚本具有相似的整体结构，但一般来说，局部成分的视觉复杂性不同。我们发现，专家汉字处理中的 LSB 可以转移到读者不熟悉的中文脚本上。相比之下，字体敏感的 LSB 效应没有转移，仅限于读者最熟悉的具有视觉复杂性的字符。这些效应表明，LSB 效应可能推广到具有相似整体结构的另一个视觉类别；相比之下，类内变化的效应（例如字体）可能取决于对刺激局部成分信息的熟悉程度，因此可能仅限于专家通常接触到的类别的示例。
