Letter Perception paper available

[Gary McGraw]

The following paper (available by anonymous ftp) may be of interest to
some on this list:

    Roles in Letter Perception: Human data and computer models

                            CRCC-TR 90

        Gary McGraw*, John Rehling*, and Robert Goldstone#
 
         * Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition 
          Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana  47405 
                                & 
          Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica 
             Loc. Pante di Povo, I-38100 Trento, Italia
                  gem at irst.it       rehling at irst.it
       
                    # Department of Psychology
          Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana  47405
                     rgoldsto at ucs.indiana.edu

                  Submitted to Cognitive Science

We present the results of an experiment in letter recognition.  Unlike
most psychological studies of letter recognition, we include in our
data set letters at the fringes of their categories and investigate
the recognition of letters in diverse styles.  We are interested in
the relationship between the recognition of prototypical letters and
the recognition of eccentric, highly-stylized letters.  Our results
provide empirical evidence for conceptual constituents of letter
categories, called roles, which exert clear top-down influence on the
segmentation of letterforms into structural components.  The human
data are analyzed in light of two computational models of letter
perception --- one connectionist and the other symbolic.  Performance
of the models is compared and contrasted with human performance using
theoretical tools that shed light on processing.  Results point in the
direction of a model using a role-based approach to letter perception.

To obtain an electronic copy of this paper:

Note that the paper (41 pages with many figures) comes in a rather large file
of 455116 bytes (compressed).

        ftp ftp.cogsci.indiana.edu
        login: anonymous
        password: <your email address>
        cd /pub/
        binary
        get mcgraw+rehling+goldstone.roles_letter_perception.ps.Z
        quit

Then at your system:

        uncompress mcgraw+rehling+goldstone.roles_letter_perception.ps.Z
        lpr -s mcgraw+rehling+goldstone.roles_letter_perception.ps

If you cannot obtain an electronic copy, send a request for a hard copy to
helga at cogsci.indiana.edu

You may also retrieve the paper via the web.  Open the URL
http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu and follow the "papers" pointer.

Gary McGraw (gem at cogsci.indiana.edu)