Abstract

What is the role of font information in reading? Words printed in a bold or italic font “pop out” from a page of text, suggesting that fonts are involved in global text page analysis. We have investigated the perceptual distinctiveness of different pairs of fonts. Text stimuli (subtending 17° × 13°) were rendered entirely with a single font or with a 6.5° × 6.5° target region in a different font from the remaining text. In each trial, the subject indicated whether the stimulus contained a target region. The decision reaction time was recorded. Every pairwise combination of AvantGarde, Bookman, Courier, Helvetica, Helvetica-Narrow, New Century Schoolbook, Palatino, and Times was tested. All seven subjects showed the same pattern of reaction times for detecting targets in each font combination. Further, the font pairs that gave the fastest reaction times also “popped out” in a second experiment in which the text was blurred (so that letter recognition was impossible). These results suggest that font analysis is a fast, global process that may use spatial frequencies lower than those critical for letter recognition.

© 1992 Optical Society of America