Burchfield Taylor, Greene Ernest
Laboratory for Neurometric Research, Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 May 20;15(5):e0224530. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0224530. eCollection 2020.
Prior work has shown that humans can successfully identify letters that are constructed with a sparse array of dots, wherein the dot pattern reflects the strokes that would normally be used to fashion a given letter. In the present work the dots were briefly displayed, one at a time in sequence, varying the spatial order in which they were shown. A forward sequence was spatially ordered as though one were passing a stroke across the dots to connect them. Experiments compared this baseline condition to the following three conditions: a) the dot sequence was spatially ordered, but in the reverse direction from how letter strokes might normally be written; b) the dots in each stroke of the letter were displayed in a random order; c) the sequence of displayed dots were chosen for display from any location in the letter. Significant differences were found between the baseline condition and all three of the comparison conditions, with letter recognition being far worse for the random conditions than for conditions that provided consistent spatial ordering of dot sequences. These findings show that spatial order is critical for integration of shape cues that have been sequentially displayed.
先前的研究表明，人类能够成功识别由稀疏点阵构成的字母，其中点阵图案反映了通常用于构成给定字母的笔画。在本研究中，点阵被短暂显示，一次显示一个，按顺序排列，改变它们显示的空间顺序。正向序列的空间排列就好像一个人将一笔画穿过这些点以将它们连接起来一样。实验将这个基线条件与以下三种条件进行了比较：a）点阵序列按空间顺序排列，但方向与字母笔画通常的书写方向相反；b）字母每个笔画中的点以随机顺序显示；c）从字母中的任何位置选择显示的点阵序列进行显示。在基线条件与所有三种比较条件之间发现了显著差异，对于随机条件，字母识别比提供点阵序列一致空间顺序的条件要差得多。这些发现表明，空间顺序对于整合顺序显示的形状线索至关重要。
