A sparse mask that persists beyond the duration of a target can reduce its visibility, a phenomenon called "object substitution masking". Y. Jiang and M. M. Chun (2001a) found an asymmetric pattern of substitution masking such that a mask on the peripheral side of the target caused stronger substitution masking than on the central side.…

Six experiments apply the masked priming paradigm to investigate how letter position information is computed during printed word perception. Primes formed by a subset of the target's letters facilitated target recognition as long as the relative position of letters was respected across prime and target (e.g., "arict" vs. "acirt" as primes for the…

The suggestion of Krueger (1973) and others that wholistic processes underlie certain perceptual judgments is taken up in this paper. (Editor)

Attempts to settle the question of whether reading units are ever larger than letters and considers the variables expected to influence the size of the reading unit. (Author/RK)

Although a feature detection theory of pattern recognition is consistent with many recent physiological findings, the specific rules governing the perception of the distinctive features of letters have not yet been determined. This article presents two new experimental procedures for determining these rules. (Editor)

This paper reports some experimental evidence on the viability of the preliminary letter recognition hypothesis. (Author)

A familiarity effect in these experiments is defined as a subject's ability to respond more rapidly to a familiar stimulus than to an unfamiliar stimulus. Evidence indicates that familiarity does not affect an initial encoding process, but it can affect a comparison process. (Editor/RK)

Investigates the effects of linguistic context, more particularly, semantic context in the form of an incomplete sentence, on the ability of observers to classify letter strings as words or nonwords. (Author/RK)

Three experiments assessed the effect of visual familiarity of words on "same-different" reaction times (RTs) in a simultaneous-matching task. All three studies showed visual familiarity to be responsible for differences in slope over sequence length between words and nonwords. (Editor/RK)

This research was concerned with the way people identify and categorize letters and digits; the author attempted to answer which of these processes occurs first, with the focus on whether there is a logically determined sequence involved. (Author/RK)