Commonalities and differences between the cognitive processes of letters and those of other visual stimuli

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Commonalities and differences between the cognitive processes of letters and those of other visual stimuli were investigated in (1) binocular onset rivalry paradigm(Abe et al.,2011) and (2)Rapid information extraction paradigm(Corvett et al.,2006). In (1), the previously presented stimulus (kana, kanji or human face) inhibitory modulated the percept in onset rivalry and observers saw in high probability the stimulus which was not presented previously. This robust stimulus-based modulation effect was contrasted with the eye-based modulation effect that was found in some appropriate conditions when color or grating was used. In (2), we used varieties of meaningful and/or nonsense visual symbols and found that the effective factors to make rapid information extraction possible were the meaningfulness and familiarity of symbols. These findings suggested promising directions of future research to evaluate the contribution of the low visual processes in meaningful symbol cognition.