Letter recognition: Effects of interitern similarity and report requirements

The effects. of auditory similarity, visual similarity, and position of letters within the Visual field upon letter recognition were investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, significant differences associated with visual, but not. auditory, similarity were found when Os were asked to report one, three, or all Items from five-item linear arrays. As report requirements increased left-right differences in report accuracy increased, although items in the center of the field were reported most accurately. In Experiment 2, either one or five items were requested from the arrays presented in Experiment 1 after a delay of 2 or 4 sec. Significant effects associated with both auditory and visual similarity were found, together with a tendency for items to the left of fixation to be reported most accurately. These results were discussed in terms of recent theories dealing with the encoding of visually presented material.