Are words perceived more clearly than nonwords? A conceptual replication and extension of Lupyan (2017)

We conducted three experiments to investigate whether previously observed differences in the perceived blurriness of words versus nonwords reflect early perceptual processes or post-perceptual cognitive factors such as memory. Building on Lupyan’s report that familiar words appear less blurry than scrambled letter strings at the same blur level in perception, we designed a forced-choice paradigm featuring an immediate “perceptual” block, where both stimuli remained visible during the judgment, and a “memory” block, where one stimulus disappeared before participants responded. Results of all experiments showed that, although nonwords were consistently more likely than words to be judged as blurrier than the word target, this difference was statistically robust only under the memory condition. This result suggests that higher-order processes, specifically memory-based reconstruction, may intensify the perceived sharpness of words. By contrast, in an immediate perceptual context, the same word–nonword effect was either not present or not significant, indicating that strictly bottom-up perceptual sharpening due to familiarity may be weaker than previously assumed. These findings highlight the need to distinguish between immediate perceptual mechanisms and post-perceptual influences such as memory or decision biases when assessing top-down effects on vision as well as the importance of timing manipulations. All three experiments also demonstrated a sharpening effect of memory for both words and nonwords, consistent with previous research.