Visual knowledge underlying letter perception: font-specific, schematic tuning.

TL;DR: The prediction of faster processing with a regular font, as compared with a mixed font, was examined in three experiments requiring the recognition of four-letter strings and showed that the disadvantage for a mixture of fonts is related to how much the representational system must be adjusted to handle the different fonts.

Abstract: The representation of visual information about letters is proposed to be highly systematic, involving not only abstract information that is invariant across type faces (or fonts), but also a number of parameters whose values are determined by the current font Th e system exploits regularities that are characteristic of letters and fonts by becoming tune d to the details of the font Thi s should result in efficient letter perception when the stimuli are regular (when all of the letters are of a consistent font), but not when the stimuli are irregular (when the letters are from a variety of fonts) Th e prediction of faster processing with a regular font, as compared with a mixed font, was examined in three experiments requiring the recognition of four-letter strings Experiment 1 confirmed the prediction, and Experiment 2 replicated the effect with the number of "features" equated across conditions. Experiment 3 showed that the disadvantage for a mixture of fonts is related to how muc h the representational system must be adjusted to handle the different fonts A central issue in cognitive an d perceptual psychology is how familiar objects are represented and perceived. This article concerns the representation and perception o f letters, which are representative of more complex objects in that they vary considerably in appearance from instance to instance: The actual form of a letter depends on the type face, or font. Therefore, it is necessary for models of letter perception to specify how the perceptual system maps letters of differen t fonts onto the appropriate abstract letter codes. The purpose of the present research was twofold, first, to begin developing a new kind of model of letter perception, one that uses the idea of a structural network, and, second, to test this model against a class of simpler models by examining how perceptual representations might become systematically tuned for a particular font. A useful general approach to the recognition problem is to