A Study On The Competition Between Faces And Identifiable Chinese Characters During Early Visual Processing

The production of symbolic written language is an important milestone in the development of human civilization. According to the neuronal recycling hypothesis, during cultural learning, pre-existing object processes may be recruited for the processing of cultural objects (e.g., symbolic written language), setting up a potentially competitive relationship between learned character and pre-existing object processing.We mainly investigated the relationships between Chinese characters from different identification levels and pre-existing objects during early visual processing and the potential factors of the above relationships, and used event-related potential (ERP) technique to examine their time courses.Study 1 used a competition paradigm to probe electrophysiological correlates of identification levels of Chinese characters and the relationship between processing of Chinese characters from different identification levels and of faces. Our findings indicate that N170 was modulated by identification level in relation to training. More importantly, our results demonstrate that identifiable Chinese characters after learning competed with faces in an early stage of visual processing.Study 2 added houses as another kind of stimuli and adopted a competition paradigm to further explore the different relationships between the processing of Chinese characters and faces and between Chinese characters and nonface stimuli(e.g. houses) at an early visual processing stage. We observed a primary competition between faces and identifiable Chinese characters but not between houses and identifiable Chinese characters during early visual processing. Our results replicate our earlier finding of a modulatory effect of Chinese character identification level on N170 amplitude. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate that the neural mechanisms for processing faces and houses are different at an early visual processing stage.Findings of studies 1 and 2 indicate that the relationships between the processing of identifiable Chinese characters and faces and between identifiable Chinese characters and nonface stimuli (e.g. houses) are different. Nevertheless, do particular physical properties of the Chinese characters influence the above competitive relationships? To address this issue, we firstly explore whether physical properties of the Chinese characters affect the processing of Chinese characters themselves. Orthographic regularity is critical for the correct recognition of Chinese characters. In study 3, we investigated how orthographic regularity influences the recognition of real Chinese characters and whether common potential effect related to orthographic regularity exists in successive (SUCC) and concurrent (CONC) conditions with asynchronous presentation of SI and S2 rather than the simultaneous (SIM) condition with synchronous presentation and disappearance of S1 and S2, We found an inhibition effect of orthographic regularity on the recognition of real Chinese characters. In addition, the inhibition effect was present in the SUCC and CONC conditions rather than SIM, showing that consistent results in SUCC and CONC may have been due to asynchronous presentations of S1 and S2 and common inhibition processes in the SUCC and CONC conditions. Our findings replicate the earlier finding that different neural mechanisms underlie real and false character processing.Collectively, we obtained the following novel findings:faces but not houses compete with identifiable Chinese characters during early visual processing. There was an inhibition effect of orthographic regularity on the recognition of real Chinese characters and the inhibition effect was present in the SUCC and CONC conditions rather than SIM. These findings make us have a deep knowledge of Chinese character processing. However, whether orthographic...