MIGRATION OF KANJI CHARACTERS AND THEIR RADICALS IN RAPID SERIAL VISUAL PRESENTATION

We investigated the spatio-temporal characteristics of visual attentio n. In rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) tasks using Kanji charac ters, we found temporal migration of characters (Experiment I) and rad icals (Experiment 2). In Experiment i, the migration was more frequent for the word condition than for the pseudoword condition. Migration w ith the distracter preceding the target was more frequent than that wi th the distracter following the target in both experiments. Temporal c haracter and radical migration suggests that characters in words and r adicals of characters are separately integrated in RSVP situations whe re attention is overloaded. However, the hypothesis of independent fea ture integration is rejected. This dependency means that the attention al units of words and characters might exist.