Gestaltzerfall (German for "shape decomposition" or Gestalt decomposition [1] ) is a type of visual agnosia and is a psychological phenomenon where delays in recognition are observed when a complex shape is stared at for a while as the shape seems to decompose into its constituting parts. In plain terms, if a subject reads or hears the same term over and over, that term ceases to have any meaning. With regards to kanji, a study has shown that delays are most significant when the characters are of the same size. When characters to recognize are of different sizes, delays are observed only when they are of different patterns. [2]
Gestaltzerfall has also been described as a phenomenon where the output signals from the brain go beyond their expected range. [3]
The phenomenon was first described and named by C. Faust in 1947 as a symptom of the bilateral region of the parieto-occipital sulcus after a through-and-through bullet wound of this region. Afterwards, when the subject stared at a truck for a while the truck seemed to decompose into its motor, chassis, driver cab and the person could only focus on one of these parts until he briefly closed his eyes or looked away which reset the shape to the complete truck again. [4]
Gestaltzerfall has also been applied in the case of spoken text where the speaker experiences a slip of the tongue during repeated poetry lectures. [5] The characteristic of orthographic satiation as opposed to semantic satiation is that meaning remains intact. It was suggested that this is different from semantic satiation and from the stimulus familiarization effect because orthographic satiation occurs after the perceivers have access to lexical meaning. [6]
Kana are syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. In current usage, kana most commonly refers to hiragana and katakana. It can also refer to their ancestor magana, which were Chinese characters used phonetically to transcribe Japanese ; and hentaigana, which are historical variants of the now-standard hiragana.
Kanji are the logographic Chinese characters adapted from the Chinese script used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana. The characters have Japanese pronunciations; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as shinjitai, by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the common folk. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in common communication.
In a written language, a logogram, also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script. A writing system that primarily uses logograms is called a logography. Non-logographic writing systems, such as alphabets and syllabaries, are phonemic: their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However, all known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle, and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling the writing system to adequately encode human language.
Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology and a theory of perception that emphasises the processing of entire patterns and configurations, and not merely individual components. It emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist psychology.
Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing a language's entire vocabulary requires thousands of different characters. Characters are created according to several different principles, where aspects of both shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate the character's meaning.
A radical, or indexing component, is a visually prominent component of a Chinese character under which the character is traditionally listed in a Chinese dictionary. The radical for a character is typically a semantic component, but can also be another structural component or even an artificially extracted portion of the character. In some cases the original semantic or phonological connection has become obscure, owing to changes in the meaning or pronunciation of the character over time.
In psychology, jamais vu, a French loanword meaning "never seen", is the phenomenon of experiencing a situation that one recognizes in some fashion, but that nonetheless seems novel and unfamiliar.
An afterimage is an image that continues to appear in the eyes after a period of exposure to the original image. An afterimage may be a normal phenomenon or may be pathological (palinopsia). Illusory palinopsia may be a pathological exaggeration of physiological afterimages. Afterimages occur because photochemical activity in the retina continues even when the eyes are no longer experiencing the original stimulus.
Man'yōgana is an ancient writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. It was the first known kana system to be developed as a means to represent the Japanese language phonetically. The date of the earliest usage of this type of kana is not clear, but it was in use since at least the mid-7th century. The name "man'yōgana" derives from the Man'yōshū, a Japanese poetry anthology from the Nara period written with man'yōgana.
Figure–ground organization is a type of perceptual grouping that is a vital necessity for recognizing objects through vision. In Gestalt psychology it is known as identifying a figure from the background. For example, black words on a printed paper are seen as the "figure", and the white sheet as the "background".
Simultanagnosia is a rare neurological disorder characterized by the inability of an individual to visually perceive more than a single object at a time. This type of visual attention problem is one of three major components of Bálint's syndrome, an uncommon and incompletely understood variety of severe neuropsychological impairments involving space representation. The term "simultanagnosia" was first coined in 1924 by Wolpert to describe a condition where the affected individual could see individual details of a complex scene but failed to grasp the overall meaning of the image.
The lexical decision task (LDT) is a procedure used in many psychology and psycholinguistics experiments. The basic procedure involves measuring how quickly people classify stimuli as words or nonwords.
In Japanese language, Ryakuji are colloquial simplifications of kanji.
Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. Extended inspection or analysis in place of repetition also produces the same effect.
Chinese characters may have several variant forms—visually distinct glyphs that represent the same underlying meaning and pronunciation. Variants of a given character are allographs of one another, and many are directly analogous to allographs present in the English alphabet, such as the double-storey ⟨a⟩ and single-storey ⟨ɑ⟩ variants of the letter A, with the latter more commonly appearing in handwriting. Some contexts require usage of specific variants.
The neuroanatomy of memory encompasses a wide variety of anatomical structures in the brain.
Amorphosynthesis, also called a hemi-sensory deficit, is a neuropsychological condition in which a patient experiences unilateral inattention to sensory input. This phenomenon is frequently associated with damage to the right cerebral hemisphere resulting in severe sensory deficits that are observed on the contralesional (left) side of the body. A right-sided deficit is less commonly observed and the effects are reported to be temporary and minor. Evidence suggests that the right cerebral hemisphere has a dominant role in attention and awareness to somatic sensations through ipsilateral and contralateral stimulation. In contrast, the left cerebral hemisphere is activated only by contralateral stimuli. Thus, the left and right cerebral hemispheres exhibit redundant processing to the right-side of the body and a lesion to the left cerebral hemisphere can be compensated by the ipsiversive processes of the right cerebral hemisphere. For this reason, right-sided amorphosynthesis is less often observed and is generally associated with bilateral lesions.
In neuroscience, the visual P200 or P2 is a waveform component or feature of the event-related potential (ERP) measured at the human scalp. Like other potential changes measurable from the scalp, this effect is believed to reflect the post-synaptic activity of a specific neural process. The P2 component, also known as the P200, is so named because it is a positive going electrical potential that peaks at about 200 milliseconds after the onset of some external stimulus. This component is often distributed around the centro-frontal and the parieto-occipital areas of the scalp. It is generally found to be maximal around the vertex of the scalp, however there have been some topographical differences noted in ERP studies of the P2 in different experimental conditions.
Character amnesia is a phenomenon where experienced speakers of some East Asian languages forget how to write Chinese characters previously well-known to them. The phenomenon is specifically tied to prolonged and extensive use of input methods, such as those that use romanizations of characters, and is documented to be a significant issue in China and Japan. Modern technologies, such as mobile phones and computers, allow users to enter Chinese characters using a phonetic transcription without knowing how to write them by hand. Whether or not the phenomenon is as widespread or troubling as some have claimed is the subject of debate.
Ideasthesia is a neuropsychological phenomenon in which activations of concepts (inducers) evoke perception-like sensory experiences (concurrents). The name comes from the Ancient Greek ἰδέα and αἴσθησις, meaning 'sensing concepts' or 'sensing ideas'. The notion was introduced by neuroscientist Danko Nikolić, but can be seen in examples in the Ethics of Spinoza, as an alternative explanation for a set of phenomena traditionally covered by synesthesia.