ADDRESSING ISSUES IN LETTER RECOGNITION

The present research strategy utilizes factorial designs, functional measurement, testing of mathematical models and strong inference in the study of letter perception. To test the viability of this framework, subjects judged a number of ambiguous letters, varying between Q and G, in both a rating and discrete choice task. The letters were created by varying features of openness in the oval and the obliqueness of the straight line. Experimental and theoretical tests on the results indicate that multiple sources of featural information simultaneously contribute to the perception of letter. The features provide continuous rather than discrete information to an integration process and the evaluation of the information provided by one feature is independent of the nature of the other features. The integration process results in the least ambiguous letter feature contributing the most to the perceptual judgment. A fuzzy logical model developed in other domains, such as speech perception, provides a good description of exactly these phenomena.