School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2023 Oct;49(10):1523-1538. doi: 10.1037/xlm0001239. Epub 2023 Apr 13.
Unlike other visual objects which are invariant to the left-right orientation, mirror letters (e.g., b and d) represent different object identities. Previous masked priming lexical decision studies have suggested that the identification of a mirror letter involves suppression of its mirror image counterpart reporting as evidence that a pseudoword prime containing the mirror letter counterpart slowed down the recognition of target word relative to a control prime containing an unrelated letter (e.g., ibea-idea > ilea-idea). Furthermore, it has been reported recently that this inhibitory mirror priming effect is sensitive to the distributional bias of left/right orientation in the Latin alphabet such that only the more dominant (frequent) right-facing mirror letter prime (e.g., b) produced interference. In the present study, we examined mirror letter priming with single letters and nonlexical letter strings with adult readers. In all experiments, relative to a visually dissimilar control letter prime, both the right-facing and left-facing mirror letter prime consistently facilitated, rather than slowed down the recognition of a target letter (e.g., b-d < w-d). Assessed against an identity prime, mirror primes showed a rightward bias, although it was small in magnitude and not always significant within an individual experiment. These results provide no support for a mirror suppression mechanism in the identification of mirror letters, and an alternative interpretation in terms of noisy perception is suggested. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
与其他对左右方向不变的视觉对象不同,镜像字母(如 b 和 d)代表不同的物体身份。以前的掩蔽启动词汇判断研究表明,镜像字母的识别涉及到对其镜像字母的抑制,这表明一个包含镜像字母的伪词启动对目标词的识别比一个包含不相关字母的控制启动(如 ibea-idea > ilea-idea)慢。此外,最近有报道称,这种抑制性的镜像启动效应对拉丁字母中左右方向的分布偏向敏感,只有更占主导地位(频繁)的右侧镜像字母启动(如 b)会产生干扰。在本研究中,我们用成人读者检查了单个字母和非词汇字母串的镜像字母启动。在所有实验中,相对于视觉上不相似的控制字母启动,右侧和左侧的镜像字母启动都一致地促进了对目标字母的识别(如 b-d < w-d),而不是减慢了识别速度。与身份启动相比,镜像启动表现出右偏性,尽管其幅度较小,且在个体实验中并不总是显著。这些结果不支持在识别镜像字母时存在镜像抑制机制的观点,而是提出了一种基于噪声感知的替代解释。