抄録
The purpose of the experiment was to examine the effect of the background letters of the Japanese Kana-list which 10 students searched under three conditions on visual processing. One kind of background letters was physically similar to the target (PS condition), or was the nominally identical with the target (NI condition). In the control (C) conditon, neither of these letters was involved. The searching time through a list was longer in NI than in C and was longer in PS than in NI condition. The results suggested that the stimulus was coded not only at the physical level but at the nominal level. The fixation time was prolonged in PS and NI than in C. The number of saccades increased in PS and NI than in C, and it showed the tendency to increase in PS than in NI. It was suggested that the two factors affected the processing of background : One was the ability of capturing a letter by peripheral vision. The other was the degree of difficulty to decide whether the letter was the target or not.
