Porto Alexander, Huckle Nikolai, Basalyga Alexander, Santiago Julio, Kranjec Alexander
Department of Psychology, Duquesne University, 600 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15219, USA.
Independent Researcher, Pittsburgh, PA, 15282, USA.
Behav Res Methods. 2025 May 14;57(6):173. doi: 10.3758/s13428-025-02682-7.
Writing systems are an underused source of stimuli for behavioral and computational experiments in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and anthropology, despite being ecologically relevant and systematically different in shape, structure, and orientation. One possible reason that glyphs of writing systems are not commonly used in behavioral research concerns their profound complexity. However, recent developments in computer vision (i.e., geometric shape analysis) offer tools to automatically assess their visual dimensions. The current work describes an open-access database of 3,208 glyphs from diverse writing systems that have been normed by computational analyses in terms of shape angularity using an array of measurements. We further validate these norms by obtaining human judgments of angularity for a subset of 400 glyphs and show that they correlate highly with computational measures, in particular with first-order entropy of edge orientation. Additionally, we provide methods for standardized glyph generation based on Unicode ranges, a straightforward example of computational shape analysis, and a demonstration of automated transliteration of glyphs from Unicode strings using a pre-existing Python library. These procedures should facilitate the characterization of angularity of new glyphs and any other kind of visual shape by independent researchers. The present work will be helpful to scientists working across different topics in the various cognitive science subdisciplines.
书写系统是认知心理学、心理语言学和人类学中行为与计算实验未充分利用的刺激源，尽管它们在生态上具有相关性，且在形状、结构和方向上存在系统差异。书写系统的符号在行为研究中未被普遍使用的一个可能原因是其极度复杂性。然而，计算机视觉（即几何形状分析）的最新进展提供了自动评估其视觉维度的工具。当前的工作描述了一个开放获取的数据库，其中包含来自不同书写系统的3208个符号，这些符号已通过计算分析，使用一系列测量方法在形状角度方面进行了标准化。我们通过获取400个符号子集的角度的人类判断来进一步验证这些标准，并表明它们与计算测量高度相关，特别是与边缘方向的一阶熵相关。此外，我们提供了基于Unicode范围的标准化符号生成方法、计算形状分析的一个简单示例，以及使用现有的Python库从Unicode字符串自动音译符号的演示。这些程序应有助于独立研究人员对新符号和任何其他类型的视觉形状的角度进行表征。目前的工作将有助于从事各种认知科学子学科不同主题研究的科学家。
