Transfer of the left-side bias effect in perceptual expertise: The case of simplified and traditional Chinese character recognition

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.

在面容与专家对汉字的感知中观察到的左侧偏差（LSB）效应，被提议作为视觉物体识别的专业技能标志。然而，在汉字感知中，此效应仅限于以熟悉字体印刷的汉字（字体敏感的LSB效应）。在本研究中，我们探讨了LSB和字体敏感的LSB效应是否依赖于参与者对刺激物的全局结构或局部成分信息的熟悉程度，通过考察其在简体字和繁体字之间的迁移效应：两种汉字书写系统在整体结构上相似，但在局部成分的视觉复杂性方面存在差异。我们发现，专家对汉字的处理中的LSB效应可以迁移到读者不熟悉的汉字书写系统。相反，字体敏感的LSB效应并未迁移，且仅限于读者最熟悉的视觉复杂性的汉字。这些效应表明，LSB效应可能被泛化到具有相似整体结构的另一个视觉类别；相比之下，如字体等类别内变异的影响可能依赖于对刺激物局部成分信息的熟悉程度，因此可能仅限于专家通常接触到的类别样本。