Change detection and Chinese characters: The reader advantage

The change-detection task can be used to assess how efficiently individuals perceive visual information. While reading ability allows us to efficiently recognize written characters, little is known about whether it also facilitates detection of changes to these characters. Three experiments were conducted to investigate this question. Participants saw many Chinese characters or Chinese-like artificial characters in flickering images and were required to find the one that was changing. Chinese readers were faster than non-readers when detecting changes to Chinese characters, but there was no difference between the performance of readers and non-readers when detecting changes to meaningless artificial characters. Also, readers detected changes faster when all of the unchanging characters were Chinese, and slower when they were artificial. These findings demonstrate a reader advantage when detecting changes to Chinese characters. That is, readers' ability to differentiate meaningful and meaningless written characters allowed them to detect character changes more efficiently.