On the nature of perceptual information during letter perception

Letter perception has been traditionally viewed as a process in which individual features are accumulated over time. In order to test this notion, a special stimulus set was created having little or no featural redundancy. Using a masking paradigm, confusion matrices were generated at each of eight interstimulus intervals. Few, if any, of the predictions made by the feature accumulation models were upheld. Instead, it is suggested that letter perception is better thought of as a global-to-local process. When a letter is presented, an observer initially perceives a large array of perceptual data. Over time, a clearer view of the stimulus emerges as the perceptual system brings the letter into focus. Thus, global information about the letter is available quite early in processing, while the letter’s more local aspects become available only after relatively extensive perceptual processing.