I am curious about a vision/perception phenomena:
Why do we lose the ability to recognize a word after having been looking at it for a long time, especially Chinese characters. Is there any difference in our vision system's signal processing. Does anyone have insight on this?
I think you will find the accurate insight that you are searching as the question grows .. so being in the same position with you explaining a personal phenomena about our cognition, I didnt understand if its about memorizing a word optically (blink an eye) or as looking at it for a long time (through processing) ?..
The second one is more rare for me to happen.
My guess would be that neuronal responses from areas involved in object recognition such as the perirhinal cortex can only be sustained for a limited amount of time and then go back to a baseline level.
The perirhinal cortex - as E. Murray has brilliantly described - is involved in both object perception and object recognition memory - and we know that phasic reaction to stimulus presentation may explain recognition performance and may also be involved in what has been described as 'repetition suppression'. But neural responses typically follow stimulus presentation and then go back to baseline fairly quickly, possibly explaining the phenomenon you are describing.
A possible exception is represented by prefrontal cortex neurons which have been known to stay active during long intervals (e.g. in delayed matching to sample procedures).
Great! Thank you for detailed answer…I really catch some reasons of it. I will pay attention to perirhinal and prefrontal cortex in the future study.
An interesting and related phenomenon is the age old phenomenon of semantic satiation. Semantic satiation refers to the tendency for words to lose their meanings, when repeated often. It is a robust and replicable sensation, and experimental paradigms have been devised to study it. For a good example of such a paradigm and for a brief overview of the literature on this subject, see the paper on my Researchgate page by Kuhl & Anderson. It's pretty close to what you are asking about.
Yeah! So close related to my question. And may be the semantic satiation circuits exist in everyone and can become more noticeable as age increases. I will peruse it you paper later. So much for your insight…
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