Recognizing Chinese Characters in Peripheral Vision: Different Levels of Processing of Character.

It hasn’t been clear how holistic and analytic processing contribute to character recognition yet. The current study focused on two issues: (1) whether configural processing is sufficient to support the performance of identifying characters in absence of analytic processing; (2) whether configural processing involves multiple levels of character recognition. We examined the inversion effect in different levels of character processing from foveal to peripheral vision. Participants were asked to identify the stimulus from nine alternatives after a stimulus (character, radical, and stroke) is presented either in upright or inverted orientation. The results showed that the identification of characters and radicals had robust peripheral inversion effects at the locations of 6.2° and 12.2°, but the identification accuracies of inverted stimulus (parts only) remained above chance. These findings suggested that the configural processing of characters could not be isolated from analytical processing in the periphery in the current study. Furthermore, the greater inversion effect shown for characters than radicals at 6.2° might indicate that holistic processing of characters involves two levels of configurations: character structure and radical processing. The peripheral inversion effect for stroke was also observed and the role of stroke-based analytic in character recognition was discussed.