Paper features: a neglected source of information for letter recognition

Adult observers have surprisingly low calculation efficiencies for letter recognition (see, e.g., Pelli, Burns, Farell, & Moore-Page, 2006). Here, we examine the possibility that this is partly due to observers' neglecting paper features (e.g., the absence of ascenders and descenders in 'o'). Each of 16 observers completed 5,000 trials of a single-letter two-alternative forced-choice detection task. Using a combination of classification image analyses and Bayesian statistical analyses, we argue that between 60% and 75% of our participants indeed neglected paper features.