Characteristics and neural mechanisms of handwritten character recognition

doi:10.3724/SP.J.1042.2018.01174

Abstract

Abstract:

There is a great difference between the recognition process of handwritten words and printed words. Compared with the printed words, the recognition of handwritten characters is more influenced by text material. The factors related to the text material include physical structural characteristics of the text, the character characteristics, and the writing style. Research on the neural mechanisms found that the brain regions under recognizing handwritten character is different from those under recognizing printed words. The activation brain area of recognizing handwritten words include the occipital lobe and lateral frontal and parietal lobes, which is the same as those of recognizing the printed words; and also include the left posterior motor cortex, the lateral prefrontal cortex and the posterior parietal cortex, which is different from those of recognizing the printed words. Handwritten word processing involves both holistic processing and feature processing. The future research should further explore around two aspects. The first is how the brain extracts the target words from the noisy visual information when we recognize the handwritten words. The second is to consider building a theoretical model of handwritten character recognition to explain the recognition process of the handwritten characters more efficiently.

Key words: handwritten words, character recognition, printed words, neural mechanisms

CLC Number:

B842

REN Xiaoqian, FANG Xian, SUI Xue, WU Yan. Characteristics and neural mechanisms of handwritten character recognition[J]. Advances in Psychological Science, 2018, 26(7): 1174-1185.

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