Abstract
The left-side bias (LSB) effect observed in face and expert Chinese character perception is suggested to be an expertise marker for visual object recognition. However, in character perception this effect is limited to characters printed in a familiar font (font-sensitive LSB effect). Here we investigated whether the LSB and font-sensitive LSB effects depend on participants’ familiarity with global structure or local component information of the stimuli through examining their transfer effects across simplified and traditional Chinese scripts: the two Chinese scripts share similar overall structures but differ in the visual complexity of local components in general. We found that LSB in expert Chinese character processing could be transferred to the Chinese script that the readers are unfamiliar with. In contrast, the font-sensitive LSB effect did not transfer, and was limited to characters with the visual complexity the readers were most familiar with. These effects suggest that the LSB effect may be generalized to another visual category with similar overall structures; in contrast, effects of within-category variations such as fonts may depend on familiarity with local component information of the stimuli, and thus may be limited to the exemplars of the category that experts are typically exposed to.
Highlights
Mirror symmetry is a salient characteristic of many natural objects, such as patterns on the wings of butterflies, and human faces to a large extent [1]
Previous research revealed that left-side bias (LSB) is a perceptual expertise marker of visual object recognition [14]
Our results added to the evidence by showing that both Chinese reader groups demonstrated LSB in the perception of Chinese characters while novices did not
Summary
Mirror symmetry is a salient characteristic of many natural objects, such as patterns on the wings of butterflies, and human faces to a large extent [1]. A consistent left-side bias (LSB) in the perception of faces has been found: humans have a tendency to judge the left-left composite face to be more representative of the original face than the right-right composite face [2] (see Fig 1 for example, and refer to method section for consent of the participant).
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