Abstract
When unrelated letter strings are presented tachistoscopically, the end letters are reported more often than their neighbors; and when spaces are inserted into strings, performance on certain adjacent letters is superior to performance on those letters when no spaces were present. An experiment was conducted to determine the nature of those spacing effects. Letter strings were presented at a variety of retinal locations, and spaces were inserted into different positions in the instructed left-right processing order. The space effect was unrelated to processing order, but it was dependent on retinal location. To account for the various asymmetries, it was necessary to postulate that letters tend to interact with adjacent lettersand that the interaction was not spatially symmetric. Furthermore, it was found that spaces had greater effects on “right-hand” letters than on symmetric letters. It was therefore concluded that letters interact at the feature level.
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The project reported herein was performed pursuant to a grant from the U.S. Office of Education, Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The opinions expressed herein, however, do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the U.S. Office of Education, and no official endorsement by the U.S. Office of Education should be inferred. This article was written while the senior author was visiting the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California, San Diego, The center (under partial support from NIMH Grant MH-15828) was generous in its assistance.
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Wolford, G., Hollingsworth, S. Lateral masking in visual information processing. Perception & Psychophysics 16, 315–320 (1974). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03203949
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03203949