Cultural adaptation to Bolivian Quechua and psychometric analysis of the Patient Health Questionnaire PHQ-9.

OBJECTIVE: Cultural adaptation of the Patient Health Questionnaire-PHQ-9 to Bolivian Quechua and analysis of the internal structure validity, reliability, and measurement invariance by sociodemographic variables. METHODS: The PHQ-9 was translated and back-translated (English-Quechua-English) to optimise translation. For the cultural adaptation, experts, and people from the target population (e.g., in focus groups) verified the suitability of the translated PHQ-9. For the psychometric analysis, we performed a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to evaluate internal validity, calculated α and ω indices to assess reliability, and performed a Multiple Indicator, Multiple Cause (MIMIC) model for evaluating measurement invariance by sex, age, marital status, educational level and residence. We used standard goodness-of-fit indices to interpret both CFA results. RESULTS: The experts and focus groups improved the translated PHQ-9, making it clear and culturally equivalent. For the psychometric analysis, we included data from 397 participants, from which 73.3% were female, 33.0% were 18-30 years old, 56.7% reported primary school studies, 63.2% were single, and 62.0% resided in urban areas. In the CFA, the single-factor model showed adequate fit (Comparative Fit Index = 0.983; Tucker-Lewis Index = 0.977; Standardized Root Mean Squared Residual = 0.046; Root Mean Squared Error of Approximation = 0.069), while the reliability was optimal (α = 0.869-0.877; ω = 0.874-0.885). The invariance was confirmed across all sociodemographic variables (Change in Comparative Fit Index (delta) or Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (delta) < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: The PHQ-9 adapted to Bolivian Quechua offers a valid, reliable and invariant unidimensional measurement across groups by sex, age, marital status, educational level and residence.

A further specification of the effects of font emphasis on reading comprehension: Evidence from event-related potentials and neural oscillations.

The attention hypothesis, which assumes that font emphasis captures readers' attention, is usually used to explain the mechanism by which such emphasis operates. This study further delineates the attention hypothesis by investigating the ways in which font emphasis captures attention and its effects on the integration of emphasized information into the previous context. We computed event-related potentials and frequency band-specific electroencephalographic power changes occurring while participants read sentences containing critical words that were either emphasized (i.e., displayed in a color different from the other words in the sentence) or not (i.e., shown in the same color as the rest of the sentence) and semantically congruent with prior words or not. The results showed that the emphasized words (as compared to control words) elicited a reduced N1 and increased P2, indicating that font emphasis reduced familiarity-based visuo-orthographic processing and instead increased controlled attentional processing. We also observed greater P300 and power decreases in the alpha and beta frequency range in response to critical words in the emphasized condition, suggesting that font emphasis enhances focal attention to promote a fuller integration of information into the sentence context. Furthermore, relative to the control condition, the emphasized condition induced delta and theta power increases for the incongruent words. These results suggest that font emphasis increases the efficiency of glyph processing, which facilitates lexical access.

The perceived importance of words in large font guides learning and selective memory.

People are often presented with large amounts of information to remember, and in many cases, the font size of information may be indicative of its importance (such as headlines or warnings). In the present study, we examined how learners perceive the importance of information in different font sizes and how beliefs about font size influence selective memory. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with to-be-remembered words that were either unrelated or related to a goal (e.g., items for a camping trip) in either small or large font. Participants rated words in large font as more important to remember than words in small font when the words in a list were unrelated but not when the words were schematically related to a goal. In Experiments 2 and 3, we were interested in how learners' belief that font size is indicative of importance translates to their ability to selectively encode and recall valuable information. Specifically, we presented participants with words in various font sizes, and larger fonts either corresponded to greater point values or smaller point values (values counted towards participants' scores if recalled). When larger fonts corresponded with greater point values, participants were better able to selectively remember high-value words relative to low-value words. Thus, when to-be-remembered information varies in value, font size may be less diagnostic of an item's importance (the item's importance drives memory), and when the value of information is consistent with a learner's belief, learners can better engage in selective memory.

The effect of emotional valence and font size on metacognition and memory.

Predictions about memory involve the use of metacognition, and metacognition can rely on various cues. The present study investigated metacognition and recall performance when to-be-remembered words differed in font size and emotional valence, to determine what cues are utilised when making metacognitive judgments. Participants were presented with lists of words varying in font size (small and large) and emotional valence (negative and neutral) and were asked to remember as many words as possible for a later recall test while engaging in item-level metacognitive assessments. Specifically, after studying each word, participants either made only judgments of learning (JOLs, Experiment 1) or both JOLs and restudy judgments (Experiment 2). Across experiments, results revealed that while JOLs were sensitive to both font size and emotional valence, restudy judgments were mostly sensitive to emotional valence, and participants' metacognitive assessments mapped onto memory performance generally for emotional words. Additionally, we found that the effect of font size on metacognition and memory was robust to experience-based learning. Together, the current study extends our understanding of how emotion and font size affect metacognition (monitoring and control) and memory and suggests that when presented with multiple cues, certain diagnostic cues can be harnessed to mitigate metacognitive illusions.

Design and Implementation of Dongba Character Font Style Transfer Model Based on AFGAN.

Dongba characters are ancient ideographic scripts with abstract expressions that differ greatly from modern Chinese characters; directly applying existing methods cannot achieve the font style transfer of Dongba characters. This paper proposes an Attention-based Font style transfer Generative Adversarial Network (AFGAN) method. Based on the characteristics of Dongba character images, two core modules are set up in the proposed AFGAN, namely void constraint and font stroke constraint. In addition, in order to enhance the feature learning ability of the network and improve the style transfer effect, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) mechanism is added in the down-sampling stage to help the network better adapt to input font images with different styles. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the generated font and the real font were conducted by consulting with professional artists based on the newly built small seal script, slender gold script, and Dongba character dataset, and the styles of the small seal script and slender gold script were transferred to Dongba characters. The results indicate that the proposed AFGAN method has advantages in evaluation indexes and visual quality compared to existing networks. At the same time, this method can effectively learn the style features of small seal script and slender gold script, and transfer them to Dongba characters, indicating the effectiveness of this method.

Rejecting small! Accepting larger? Optimizing the font size of Chinese characters basing legibility and visual fatigue in OST-HMDs.

Font size is highly related to the legibility and visual fatigue in OST-HMDs, but the effects of font size on these factors remain further explored. An experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of a wider range of Chinese character font size (0.32°-1°) on legibility and visual fatigue, as well as to determine the optimal font size. Results showed that 0.32° had the worst legibility, but there was no continuous improvement as font size increased. A larger font size was found to be beneficial in reducing visual fatigue until it reached 0.95°, beyond which visual fatigue would relatively increase. Font size smaller than 0.32° should be rejected while a larger font size does not always provide more benefits. Considering legibility, visual fatigue and efficiency of text presentation, 0.84° is a relatively optimal Chinese character font size.

The emergence of Metaverse concept has driven significant advancements in OST-HMDs, while optimising the font size has become a fundamental concern in ensuring legibility and display effectiveness. Considering legibility and subjective visual fatigue, we conducted an experiment which demonstrated a moderate font size (0.84°) for Chinese characters is relatively optimal.

The font size effect depends on inter-item relation.

The font size effect refers to the metacognitive illusion that larger fonts lead to higher judgments of learning (JOLs) but not better recall. Prior studies demonstrated robust JOL effects of font size under conditions of intra-item relation (i.e., cue-target relatedness within a word pair), even though intra-item relation is a more diagnostic cue than font size. However, it remains an open question whether the JOL effects of font size persist under conditions of inter-item relation (i.e., relations across items on a single-word list). In the current study, we examined the JOL and recall effects of font size when font size and inter-item relation were factorially manipulated in three JOL-recall experiments. Additionally, to manipulate the salience of inter-item relation, we presented related and unrelated lists in a blocked manner in Experiment 1 but in a mixed manner in Experiments 2 and 3. Our results showed that the JOL effects of font size are moderated or eliminated when inter-item relation is manipulated simultaneously with font size. Moreover, the smaller font led to better recall for related lists but not for unrelated lists across all three experiments. Therefore, our results demonstrate that individual cues may not be integrated with equal weight, and there can be a trade-off between item-specific and relational processing during the JOL process. Additionally, highlighting key information with larger fonts may not be optimal with related items.

The effect of font readability on the Moses illusion: A replication study.

This research is a replication study that sought to verify whether the readability of a font has an effect on the Moses illusion detection. It was designed to stimulate information retrieval from memory and confuse retrieval with a text's erroneous wording. Undergraduates aged 19-30 (N = 87, 80% women) were presented with two questions, one of which contained distorted information. We assumed that a difficult-to-read font would facilitate error detection, as it increases the focus of attention on the text. However, unlike the original study, we were unable to find support for this hypothesis, as font readability did not significantly affect error detection. In the difficult-to-read condition, 43% of participants reported an error, while, in the easy-to-read condition, errors were detected by 37% of the participants. Unlike the original study, our research results do not support the hypothesis that the visual presentation of a text affects the automatic retrieval of information from memory. This study clarifies the effect of text readability on error detection taking into consideration the role of long-term memory and visual perception.

Insights from a dyslexia simulation font: Can we simulate reading struggles of individuals with dyslexia?

Individuals with dyslexia struggle at explaining what it is like to have dyslexia and how they perceive letters and words differently. This led the designer Daniel Britton to create a font that aims to simulate the perceptual experience of how effortful reading can be for individuals with dyslexia (http://danielbritton.info/dyslexia). This font removes forty percent of each character stroke with the aim of increasing reading effort, and in turn empathy and understanding for individuals with dyslexia. However, its efficacy has not yet been empirically tested. In the present study, we compared participants without dyslexia reading texts in the dyslexia simulation font to a group of individuals with dyslexia reading the same texts in Times New Roman font. Results suggest that the simulation font amplifies the struggle of reading, surpassing that experienced by adults with dyslexia-as reflected in increased reading time and overall number of eye movements in the majority of typical readers reading in the simulation font. Future research could compare the performance of the Daniel Britton simulation font against a sample of beginning readers with dyslexia as well as seek to design and empirically test an adapted simulation font with an increased preserved percentage of letter strokes [Correction added on 10 December 2021, after initial online publication. Abstract has been added].

Towards a standardisation of reading charts: Font effects on reading performance-Times New Roman with serifs versus the sans serif font Helvetica.

PURPOSE: The purpose was to compare systematically the legibility of a font without serifs (Helvetica) and one with serifs (Times New Roman). METHODS: Three paragraphs that were equal in the number of words, syllables, characters, difficulty and reading length were printed at equal size, with equal spacing between the lines and equal layout (paperback style), in either the sans serif typeface Helvetica Neue T1 55 Roman (Adobe) or the serif typeface Times New Roman PS Roman (Adobe). They were also printed in newspaper format in the serif font. The paragraphs were presented in random order (Latin square design) to 36 participants between 18 and 38 years of age (wearing their best-corrected visual acuity). Reading duration was measured with a stopwatch. Reading time, reading speed and the number of reading errors were compared. RESULTS: For the paperback layout, no significant difference in reading time (p = 0.50) or reading speed (p = 0.56) was found between the two fonts. The correlation between the two fonts was high for both reading time and speed (r = 0.93). The mean number of reading errors was the same (0.31 ± 0.58 errors/text) for both fonts. There was a significant difference in reading time and speed between the paperback and the newspaper layout. CONCLUSION: The legibility of Helvetica and Times New Roman is similar when investigated under equivalent conditions. Thus, these two font types can be used as interchangeable standard typefaces.

Flexible, Fully Printable, and Inexpensive Paper-Based Chipless Arabic Alphabet-Based RFID Tags.

This work presents the design and analysis of newly developed reconfigurable, flexible, inexpensive, optically-controlled, and fully printable chipless Arabic alphabet-based radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. The etching of the metallic copper tag strip is performed on a flexible simple thin paper substrate (ϵr = 2.31) backed by a metallic ground plane. The analysis of investigated tags is performed in CST MWS in the frequency range of 1-12 GHz for the determination of the unique signature resonance characteristics of each tag in terms of its back-scattered horizontal and vertical mono-static radar cross section (RCS). The analysis reflects that each tag has its own unique electromagnetic signature (EMS) due to the changing current distribution of metallic resonator. This EMS of each tag could be used for the robust detection and recognition of all realized 28 Arabic alphabet tags. The study also discusses, for the first time, the effect of the change in font type and size of realized tags on their EMS. The robustness and reliability of the obtained EMS of letter tags is confirmed by comparing the RCS results for selective letter tags using FDTD and MoM numerical methods, which shows very good agreement. The proposed tags could be used for smart internet of things (IoT) and product marketing applications.

Arbitrary Font Generation by Encoder Learning of Disentangled Features.

Making a new font requires graphical designs for all base characters, and this designing process consumes lots of time and human resources. Especially for languages including a large number of combinations of consonants and vowels, it is a heavy burden to design all such combinations independently. Automatic font generation methods have been proposed to reduce this labor-intensive design problem. Most of the methods are GAN-based approaches, and they are limited to generate the trained fonts. In some previous methods, they used two encoders, one for content, the other for style, but their disentanglement of content and style is not sufficiently effective in generating arbitrary fonts. Arbitrary font generation is a challenging task because learning text and font design separately from given font images is very difficult, where the font images have both text content and font style in each image. In this paper, we propose a new automatic font generation method to solve this disentanglement problem. First, we use two stacked inputs, i.e., images with the same text but different font style as content input and images with the same font style but different text as style input. Second, we propose new consistency losses that force any combination of encoded features of the stacked inputs to have the same values. In our experiments, we proved that our method can extract consistent features of text contents and font styles by separating content and style encoders and this works well for generating unseen font design from a small number of reference font images that are human-designed. Comparing to the previous methods, the font designs generated with our method showed better quality both qualitatively and quantitatively than those with the previous methods for Korean, Chinese, and English characters. e.g., 17.84 lower FID in unseen font compared to other methods.

Fonts of wider letter shapes improve letter recognition in parafovea and periphery.

Most text on modern electronic displays is set in fonts of regular letter width. Little is known about whether this is the optimal font width for letter recognition. We tested three variants of the font family Helvetica Neue (Condensed, Standard, and Extended). We ran two separate experiments at different distances and different retinal locations. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were presented in the parafovea at 2° eccentricity; in Experiment 2, the stimuli were presented in the periphery at 9° eccentricity. In both experiments, we employed a short-exposure single-report trigram paradigm in which a string of three letters was presented left or right off-centre. Participants were instructed to report the middle letter while maintaining fixation on the fixation cross. Wider fonts resulted in better recognition and fewer misreadings for neighbouring letters than narrower fonts, which demonstrated that wider letter shapes improve recognition at glance reading in the peripheral visual view. Practitioner summary: Most of the text is set in fonts of regular letter width. In two single-target trigram letter recognition experiments, we showed that wider letter shapes facilitate better recognition than narrower letter shapes. This indicates that when letter identification is a priority, it is beneficial to choose fonts of wider letter shapes.

Judgments of Learning in Context: Backgrounds Can Both Reduce and Produce Metamemory Illusions.

Varying item-specific features such as size (Rhodes & Castel, 2008) or blur (Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013) often produces metamemory illusions in which one type of item receives higher judgments of learning (JOLs) without being recalled better. In this study, we explored how similar manipulations to context would influence JOLs. When to-be-recalled words varying in size (or blur) were accompanied by backgrounds also varying in size (or blur), the traditional JOL illusions were reduced (Experiments 1, 2, 4, and 5) compared to when there were no backgrounds (Experiments 3a, 3b, and 4). Thus, the item-specific and contextual cues were used interactively. Further, the background manipulations also sometimes themselves led to metamemory illusions regarding JOLs for the to-be-remembered items. In general, there were robust individual differences in how participants used the cues, including how they incorporated the contextual cues into their JOL decisions. In part, this may explain why interactive cue utilization did not always emerge at the group level. In sum, we showed that context may affect JOLs both directly and indirectly by influencing participants' use of item-specific cues. These findings broaden our understanding of how cues may be utilized (e.g., Koriat, 1997) and integrated (e.g., Undorf, Söllner, and Bröder, 2018) in JOLs.

Disfluent difficulties are not desirable difficulties: the (lack of) effect of Sans Forgetica on memory.

Scientists working at the intersection of cognitive psychology and education have developed theoretically-grounded methods to help people learn. One important yet counterintuitive finding is that making information harder to learn - that is, creating desirable difficulties - benefits learners. Some studies suggest that simply presenting information in a difficult-to-read font could serve as a desirable difficulty and therefore promote learning. To address this possibility, we examined the extent to which Sans Forgetica, a newly developed font, improves memory performance - as the creators of the font claim. Across four experiments, we set out to replicate unpublished findings by the font's creators. Subjects read information in Sans Forgetica or Arial, and rated how difficult the information was to read (Experiment 1) or attempted to recall the information (Experiments 2-4). Although subjects rated Sans Forgetica as being more difficult to read than Arial, Sans Forgetica led to equivalent memory performance, and sometimes even impaired it. These findings suggest that although Sans Forgetica promotes a feeling of disfluency, it does not create a desirable difficulty or benefit memory.

The great typography bake-off: comparing legibility at-a-glance.

Typography plays an increasingly important role in today's dynamic digital interfaces. Graphic designers and interface engineers have more typographic options than ever before. Sorting through this maze of design choices can be a daunting task. Here we present the results of an experiment comparing differences in glance-based legibility between eight popular sans-serif typefaces. The results show typography to be more than a matter of taste, especially in safety critical contexts such as in-vehicle interfaces. Our work provides both a method and rationale for using glanceable typefaces, as well as actionable information to guide design decisions for optimised usability in the fast-paced mobile world in which information is increasingly consumed in a few short glances. Practitioner summary: There is presently no accepted scientific method for comparing font legibility under time-pressure, in 'glanceable' interfaces such as automotive displays and smartphone notifications. A 'bake-off' method is demonstrated with eight popular sans-serif typefaces. The results produce actionable information to guide design decisions when information must be consumed at-a-glance. Abbreviations: DOT: department of transportation; FAA: Federal Aviation Administration; GHz: gigahertz; Hz: hertz; IEC: International Electrotechnical Commission; ISO: International Organization for Standardization; LCD: liquid crystal display; MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; ms: milliseconds; OS: operating system.

Intensifying the intensity illusion in judgments of learning: Modality and cue combinations.

We showed that judgments of learning (JOLs) were not affected by presentation modality in a list-learning task, although the typical font-size and loudness illusions emerged in that large-font visual presentations and loud auditory presentations elicited higher JOLs than their less intense counterparts. Further, when items were presented in both modalities simultaneously, large-font/quiet and small-font/loud items received similar JOLs (and were recalled similarly). Most importantly, when the intensity manipulation was compounded across modalities, the magnitude of the illusion increased beyond that observed in a single modality, showing the influence of combining cues. Whereas recall was still the same, large-font/loud items received higher JOLs than either small-font/loud items or large-font/quiet items, and not-intense items received very low JOLs. These differences emerged only when all conditions were presented within a single list and not in a between-subjects design, underscoring the importance of comparative judgments.

Cognitive load eliminates the effect of perceptual information on judgments of learning with sentences.

Items presented in large font are rated with higher judgments of learning (JOLs) than those presented in small font. According to current explanations of this phenomenon in terms of processing fluency or implicit beliefs, this effect should be present no matter the type of material under study. However, we hypothesized that the linguistic cues present in sentences may prevent using font size as a cue for JOLs. Experiment 1, with short sentences, showed the standard font-size effect on JOLs, and Experiment 2, with pairs of longer sentences, showed a reduced effect. These results suggest that linguistic factors do not prevent font size from being used for JOLs. However, Experiment 3, with both short and long sentences, showed an effect of font size only for the former and not the latter condition, suggesting that the greater amount of to-be-remembered information eliminated the font-size effect. In Experiment 4, we tested a mechanism to explain this result and manipulated cognitive load using the dot-memory task. The short sentences from Experiments 1 and 3 were used, and the results replicated the font-size effect only in the low-cognitive load condition. Our results are consistent with the idea that perceptual information is used to make JOLs only with materials such as words, word pairs, or short sentences, and that the increased cognitive load required to process longer sentences prevents using font size as a cue for JOLs.

Words in larger font are perceived as more important: explaining the belief that font size affects memory.

Words presented in larger font size are considered more memorable and rated with higher judgments of learning (JOLs). One explanation for this phenomenon is that people believe that font size affects memory. However, it is not clear why people hold this belief. One alternative is that font size represents importance, with larger fonts implying more relevant information. More important information is judged as more memorable and is, in fact, better remembered. In Experiments 1 and 2 we presented words in small (18 points) and extra-large font (250 points) and found higher JOLs and higher judgments of importance with extra-large fonts. A mediation analysis showed that importance accounted for 21-23% of the effect of font size on JOLs. In Experiment 3, we tested whether processing fluency was higher with the extra-large font. In a lexical decision task, participants were slower at detecting words and non-words with extra-large than small font, which is the opposite of what the processing fluency hypothesis predicts. This result shows that the font-size effect persists even in conditions in which perceived fluency should be lower. In sum, this research explained the belief that font size affects memory because words in larger fonts are considered more important.

Dual Model Medical Invoices Recognition.

Hospitals need to invest a lot of manpower to manually input the contents of medical invoices (nearly 300,000,000 medical invoices a year) into the medical system. In order to help the hospital save money and stabilize work efficiency, this paper designed a system to complete the complicated work using a Gaussian blur and smoothing-convolutional neural network combined with a recurrent neural network (GBS-CR) method. Gaussian blur and smoothing (GBS) is a novel preprocessing method that can fix the breakpoint font in medical invoices. The combination of convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) was used to raise the recognition rate of the breakpoint font in medical invoices. RNN was designed to be the semantic revision module. In the aspect of image preprocessing, Gaussian blur and smoothing were used to fix the breakpoint font. In the period of making the self-built dataset, a certain proportion of the breakpoint font (the font of breakpoint is 3, the original font is 7) was added, in this paper, so as to optimize the Alexnet-Adam-CNN (AA-CNN) model, which is more suitable for the recognition of the breakpoint font than the traditional CNN model. In terms of the identification methods, we not only adopted the optimized AA-CNN for identification, but also combined RNN to carry out the semantic revisions of the identified results of CNN, meanwhile further improving the recognition rate of the medical invoices. The experimental results show that compared with the state-of-art invoice recognition method, the method presented in this paper has an average increase of 10 to 15 percentage points in recognition rate.