• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
• /
• v.6 no.1
• /
• pp.47-71
• /
• 1995

A psychological disturbance caused by letters in double image was termed as'letter sickness'.The effects of stimulus exposure time and letter familiarity on the letter sickness were measured to test a hypothesis that disturbances in eye movement and recognition stages is the cause of letter sickness.Letter sickness incteased significantly as stimulus exposure time lengthened from 50ms,100ms,to 3000ms.It was also significantly higher with familiar Hangul letters as compared with less familiar foreign letters and meaningless words as compared with meaningful words,respectively.These experimental findings imply that letter sickness is caused by the failure of adjusting eye movements to dismiss the double images.that the more familiar the letters.the more strongly the letter-identification process is commotted,resulting in the increased effect of disturbance from double image.and that the disturbance effect of double image is amplified when it is hard to extract the meaning from familiar letters.An experiment where subjects were made to learn Braille-like symbols consisting of 6 dots to test the hypothesis that the stronger the tendency to process the meaning of a symbol,the stronger becomes letter sickness due to double image,also showed that letter sickness significantly increased as a function of learning.