The Influence of Visual Magnocellular Pathway on The Recognition of Chinese Character

Abstract

The present study aimed to examine the role of visual magnocellular pathway in the recognition of Chinese character. Twenty-four university students took part in this study. We simultaneously manipulated the spatial frequency and temporal frequency of Chinese characters in order to dissociate two visual conditions, that is, the visual magnocellular (M) condition and visual control condition. And a global/local decision task was adopted here to get the comparison between global processing and local processing within each visual condition. The reaction time and error rate were recorded. Results showed that in the M condition, participants responded faster in global decision than in local decision, a global precedence effect appeared; while non-significant difference in the control condition. Similarly, higher error rate was found for local decision comparing with global decision only in the M condition. It suggested that the visual magnocellular system contributes to the global processing of Chinese character.