- Title
- The mental representation of Roman letters: revisiting Townsend's 1971 letter-identification data
- Creator
- Cassey, Peter; Eidels, Ami
- Relation
- Mathematical Models of Perception and Cognition: A Festschrift for James T. Townsend p. 72-88
- Relation
- Scientific Psychology 2
- Relation
- https://www.routledge.com/Mathematical-Models-of-Perception-and-Cognition-Volume-II-A-Festschrift/Houpt-Blaha/p/book/9781138125773
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- The ability to identify alphabet letters is fundamental to everyday life. We constantly encounter visually presented letters in e-mails, advertisements, and in the morning newspaper. Letters may vary in size, font, and color, yet despite this variability of form, the average literate person has very little trouble identifying written text. Our ability to learn to comprehensively recognize novel alphabets is very efficient, rivaling that of a native reader in relatively few trials (Pelli, Burns, Farell, & Moore-Page, 2006). Despite many years of research, from at least the Gestalt psychologists of the late 1800s and spanning over a century (see Mueller & Weidemann, 2012, for a review), the exact mechanisms underlying the perception and identification of letters are not fully understood. The current chapter focuses on the processing of letters when they are presented in isolation. In particular, the current chapter offers a fresh examination of Townsend’s 1971 alphabetic confusion data. We apply a state-of-the-art Bayesian modeling technique, the Structural Forms algorithm, to study the mental representations of Roman letters.
- Subject
- letters; alphabetic confusion data; Roman letters; Structural Forms algorithm; James T. Townsend; Mathematics
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1343370
- Identifier
- uon:29147
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781138125773
- Language
- eng
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