LEARNING TO RECOGNIZE PATTERNS - CHANGES IN THE VISUAL-FIELD WITH FAMILIARITY

Two studies were conducted to investigate changes which take place in the visual information processing of novel stimuli as they become fami liar. Japanese writing characters (Hiragana and Kanji) which were unfa miliar to two native English speaking subjects were presented using a moving window technique to restrict their visual fields. Study time fo r visual recognition was recorded across repeated sessions, and with v arying visual field restrictions. The critical visual field was define d as the size of the visual field beyond which further increases did n ot improve the speed of recognition performance. In the first study, w hen the Hiragana patterns were novel, subjects needed to see about hal f of the entire pattern simultaneously to maintain optimal performance . However, the critical visual field size decreased as familiarity wit h the patterns increased. These results were replicated in the second study with more complex Kanji characters. In addition, the critical fi eld size decreased as pattern complexity decreased. We propose a three component model of pattern perception. In the first stage a represent ation of the stimulus must be constructed by the subject, and restrict ing of the visual field interferes dramatically with this component wh en stimuli are unfamiliar. With increased familiarity, subjects become able to reconstruct a previous representation from very small, unique segments of the pattern, analogous to the informativeness areas hypot hesized by Loftus and Mackworth [J. Exp. Psychol., 4 (1978) 565].