Aging and pattern complexity effects on the visual span: evidence from Chinese character recognition

Xie, F, Li, L, Zhao, S, Wang, J, Paterson, K, White, S and Warrington, KL ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3206-8002, 2019. Aging and pattern complexity effects on the visual span: evidence from Chinese character recognition. Vision, 3 (1), p. 11.

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Abstract

Research suggests that pattern complexity (number of strokes) limits the visual span for Chinese characters, and that this may have important consequences for reading. With the present research, we investigated age differences in the visual span for Chinese characters by presenting trigrams of low, medium or high complexity at various locations relative to a central point to young (18-30 years) and older (60+ years) adults. A sentence reading task was used to assess their reading speed. The results showed that span size was smaller for high complexity stimuli compared to low and medium complexity stimuli for both age groups, replicating previous findings with young adult participants. Our results additionally showed that this influence of pattern complexity was greater for the older than younger adults, such that while there was little age difference in span size for low and medium complexity stimuli, span size for high complexity stimuli was almost halved in size for the older compared to the young adults. Finally, our results showed that span size correlated with sentence reading speed, confirming previous findings taken as evidence that the visual span imposes perceptual limits on reading speed. We discuss these findings in relation to age-related difficulty reading Chinese.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Vision
Creators:	Xie, F., Li, L., Zhao, S., Wang, J., Paterson, K., White, S. and Warrington, K.L.
Publisher:	MDPI AG
Date:	2019
Volume:	3
Number:	1
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.3390/vision3010011 DOI 1402351 Other
Rights:	© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	22 Jan 2021 11:24
Last Modified:	31 May 2021 15:07
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/42086

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