Babcock M K, Freyd J J
Cornell University.
Am J Psychol. 1988 Spring;101(1):111-30.
Handwriting recognition presents a problem for most theories of letter perception. How do people accurately discriminate letters given the variability in handwritten forms? We propose that perceivers detect and capitalize on information relating to production inherent in the static trace of the handwritten letter. In an "implicit detection" task, subjects' ability to detect stroke direction in a series of handwritten characters was found to be influenced by the particular drawing method used to generate the stimuli. Similar results were obtained in an "explicit detection" task in which the subjects were asked to speculate on the drawing method used to generate the samples. Our findings suggest that perceivers are able to extract information relating to production from the static trace. We propose that they can then use this information in conjunction with their knowledge of a common production process, shared by both producers and perceivers, to aid character recognition.
笔迹识别对大多数字母感知理论来说都是一个难题。鉴于手写形式的多变性，人们是如何准确区分字母的呢？我们认为，感知者能够检测并利用与手写字母静态痕迹中固有的书写相关的信息。在一项“隐性检测”任务中，发现受试者在一系列手写字符中检测笔画方向的能力受到用于生成刺激的特定绘图方法的影响。在一项“显性检测”任务中也得到了类似的结果，在该任务中，要求受试者推测用于生成样本的绘图方法。我们的研究结果表明，感知者能够从静态痕迹中提取与书写相关的信息。我们认为，他们随后可以将这些信息与生产者和感知者共有的常见书写过程的知识结合起来，以帮助进行字符识别。
