Member-Initiated Symposia
Symposia Overview
2008 Symposia
Perceptual expectations and the neural processing of complex images
Cortical organization
and dynamics for visual perception and beyond
Crowding
Visual Memory and the Brain
Bayesian models applied to perceptual
behavior
Action for perception: functional
significance of eye movements for vision
The past,
present, and future of the written word
Surface material perception
Symposia from Past Meetings |
The past, present, and future of the written
word
Friday, May 9, 2008, 3:30 - 5:30 pm
Royal Palm 5
Organizers:
Frederic Gosselin (Université de Montréal)
and Bosco S. Tjan (University of Southern California)
Presenters:
Susana T.L. Chung (University of Houston), Dennis M. Levi
(University of California, Berkeley),
Denis G. Pelli (New York University),
Gordon E. Legge (University of Minnesota), Mark A. Changizi
(Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute), Marlene Behrmann
(Carnegie Mellon
University)
Symposium Description
Gutenberg’s invention has
democratized the written word: It is estimated that an average English reader
will be exposed to over 100 million printed words before the age of 25. The
scientific investigation of reading pioneered by Cattell in the 19th century was
largely focused on single word recognition through the study of its cognitive,
linguistic, and other high-level determinants (e.g., lexical frequency).
Accordingly, in most of the influential theories of reading, the front-end
visual processing remains unspecified, except with the assumption that it
provides the abstract letter identities. This approach to reading greatly
underestimates the complexity and the critical role of vision. Text legibility
is strongly determined by the ease with which letters can be identified (Pelli
et al., 2003), but it appears that standard fonts (e.g., Arial, Times) may be
suboptimal as visual stimuli. For instance, the discriminability of a letter
from the remainder of the alphabet, as indexed by identification accuracy with
brief presentations, is inversely correlated with letter frequency, such that
the letters most frequently encountered in texts are among the least
discriminable. There is also a significant mismatch between the diagnostic
spatial frequency spectra of letters and the human contrast sensitivity
function, such that a large proportion of stimulus information is of poor use
for the visual system (Chung et al., 2002; Majaj et al., 2002; Poder, 2003;
Solomon & Pelli, 1994). Is there room for improvement? Previous attempts to
improve reading speed in individuals with low-vision by bandpassing word images
in the mid to high spatial frequency range led to equivocal results (Fine & Peli,
1995). However, we have recently witnessed significant advances in our
understanding of foveal and peripheral vision and the mechanisms for letter
identification and reading. Can this novel knowledge be applied to the
development of fonts optimized for normal and impaired visual systems (e.g.,
developmental, letter-by-letter, or deep dyslexia, macular degeneration,
cataract, diabetic retinopathy)? This is the challenge that the organizers of
this symposium are submitting to the participants. We hope that this will be the
first step toward vision science leading the way to a second Gutenberg-like
revolution: Instant speed reading for all!
Abstracts
Enhancing letter recognition and word reading
performance
Susana T.L. Chung
This talk will provide an
overview of our efforts in enhancing letter recognition and word reading
performance in the normal periphery and in patients with central vision loss.
Letter recognition, crowding and reading in
amblyopia
Dennis M. Levi, Denis G.
Pelli and Shuang Song
Crowding, not letter
recognition acuity, limits reading in the amblyopic visual system.
Legibility
Denis G. Pelli and Hannes F. Famira
"Legibility" means different
things to visual scientists and type designers, and type design affects the
different kinds of legibility in different ways.
The eyes have it: Sensory factors limit
reading speed
Gordon E. Legge
Sensory constraints
influence reading speed for normally sighted young adults, children, senior
citizens, people with low vision and blind Braille readers.
The structures of letters and symbols
throughout human history are selected to match those found in objects in natural
scenes
Mark A. Changizi
New research supports the
hypothesis that human visual signs look like nature, because that is what we
have evolved over millions of years to be good at seeing.
Cognitive and neural mechanisms of face and
word processing: Common principles
Marlene Behrmann and
David Plaut
Through joint empirical
studies (with normal and brain-damaged individuals) and computational
investigations, we will argue that face and word recognition are mediated by a
highly distributed and interactive cortical network whose organization is
strongly shaped and modified by experience rather than by discrete modules, each
dedicated to specific, narrowly-defined function.
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