Mason M
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 1978 Nov;4(4):662-73. doi: 10.1037//0096-1523.4.4.662.
The question under investigation is whether spatial redundancy operates by restricting the number of valid alternatives at each serial position or whether it serves a perceptual function by keeping visually confusable graphemes from appearing in the same array and/or maximizing the distance between such graphemes when they do occur in the same array. The first experiment used the same-different task to establish a confusion matrix for 12 non-linguistic symbols. The spatial relation between the members of two pairs of confusable symbols was manipulated in a second experiment, which had subjects look for the presence or absence of a predetermined target symbol in single six-symbol linear arrays. Facilitation was found to be dependent upon the perceptual consequences of serial position constraint rather than upon the constraint per se. The constraint was most effective when it served to prevent members of visually confusable pairs from occurring in the same array. Since spatial redundancy may operate at the feature extraction stage by minimizing competition for the same sets of feature detectors and since words are likely to be high in spatial redundancy, the possibility is raised that part of the word superiority effect may be due to visual factors rather than to linguistic context.
正在研究的问题是，空间冗余是通过限制每个序列位置上有效选项的数量来起作用，还是通过防止视觉上易混淆的字素出现在同一阵列中以及/或者当这些字素出现在同一阵列中时最大化它们之间的距离来发挥感知功能。第一个实验使用异同任务为12个非语言符号建立混淆矩阵。在第二个实验中，操纵了两对易混淆符号成员之间的空间关系，该实验让受试者在单个六个符号的线性阵列中寻找预定目标符号的存在或不存在。发现促进作用取决于序列位置约束的感知结果，而不是约束本身。当该约束用于防止视觉上易混淆的配对成员出现在同一阵列中时，效果最为显著。由于空间冗余可能在特征提取阶段通过最小化对同一组特征检测器的竞争来起作用，并且由于单词可能具有很高的空间冗余性，因此有人提出单词优势效应的部分原因可能是视觉因素而非语言语境。
