Letter Perception: Toward a conceptual approach

We present the results of a simple experiment in lowercase letter recognition. Unlike most psychology studies of letter recognition, we include in our data set letters at the extremes of their categories and investigate the recognition of letters of multiple typefaces. We are interested in the relationship between the recognition of normal letters and the recognition of non-standard letters. Results provide empirical evidence for top-down conceptual constraints on letter perception in the form of roles and relations between perceptually-based structural subcomponents. A process model based on the hypothesis developed below is currently being implemented. Letters and Concepts Literate humans are adept at recognizing letters in many diverse forms. Large variations in style --- especially apparent in advertising faces --- do not seem to hinder our ability to accurately identify characters. Character recognition by people is still vastly superior to that of machines. Why is it that peop..