Slashdot Mirror
MS Psychologist on How We Read
RenderMonkey writes "In another follow-up to Can You Raed Tihs? Microsoft's Kevin Larson, a cognitive psychologist, dissected the main hypotheses on how we read at ATypI's Vancouver Typography conference. "Kevin supports the 'parallel letter recognition' model. People don't he says, recognise whole-word shapes. Instead the recognise each of the letter components and then make a series of best-guesses on the information returned to assemble, first, phonemes and then words." So what about the case of patterned re-ordering, aka the counter example to Can You Raed Tihs?"
Microsoft has a psychologist?
2. Sobig
3. Linux
Well if this is true then reading phonetic script and reading chinese characters work almost exactly the same way.
Simply chinese writing has larger atomic particles (Radicals instead of letters) but otherwise the way you recognize them is basically the same, according to what this article claims.
Instead of recongizing "ology" at the end of the word you recognize the radical (base component characters are built from) that means the same thing as "ology".
I got sent the following email a couple of weeks ago:
The paomnnehil pweor of the hmuan mnid.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Amzanig huh?
I realize SCO, Microsoft, and Linux deserve to rear their heads daily, but does some weird letter swapping thing really deserve regular coverage? I thought that's what Slashback was for.
this would explain why those ELUA's are always so hard to read. or mayby its because im trying to install a russian version of windows.
in soveit russia, windows forks you!
Personal observation and various readings in the topic make me pretty confident that context is critical for letter recognition. Whether that means words are recognized as "whole words" or not, the fact is, it very clearly is not a simple, straightforward bottom up "letters then phonemes then syllables then words" recognition process. Recognizing the letters is partly a feedback loop with the words and other parts, as demonstrated by experiments where parts of letters are blacked out. In a recognizable context (i.e. a word) they're still identifiable. Standing alone, they are not.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
The first time I got this and read through and didn't even notice the letters.
Well, maybe not real spam (at least, real email spam :). I've now been sent the "raed this" text at least 4 times in my email. Mom brother in law, father in law, mother, and someone else I hardly know.
What we have here, folks, is a new email "virus" in the making. We'll be getting this from distant relatives 20 years from now (with about 80 pages of forward headers).
troll? its a joke.
Great....a justification for Leet speak...
I think the method that we choose is more dependant on the situation that we are trying to read in. If I'm driving in an unfamiliar neighborhood and trying to find a street sign, I'm more likely to look for a word shape that will correspond to what I'm looking for. The same can be used if I'm scanning a large log file looking for a particular word or phrase. If I get a quick glance at a page of text, I'll be more apt to use the parralel word recognition. If I'm reading a paperback, I'll look at the letters in a serial fashion.
Again, why does it have to be just one method that is used?
In general its right on, my spelling is bad, so bad that none of my story's ever Mmade ( sorry had to ) it In /. But my reading is fine, it's a way of guessing words, if you ask me about the text word by word I in deep trouble if you ask me about the meaning of the text I'm fine, best thing is that I'm able to read 4-5 pages in the time that you read 1
I just hate bit SPAM, (www.netnoise.com.kh)
After reading the article, it seems rather lacking in explanation. Okay, so Larson says that there are three main models for word recognition and presented evidence for and against each one; parallel letter recognition being the one supported by his evidence. The article then goes on to present none of the evidence, which is a shame as it could have been enlightening for us masses.
So, we have our counter-example here but what about the rest of the rules to flesh this out? What rules do we need to follow to still allow comprehension of otherwise obfuscated text, and what rules produce unintelligible rubbish?
Incidentally, could this be used as our next method for determining a human user versus a program, rather than using images? How well could this survive being decrypted by a well crafted perl script? Maybe some research is in order...
Parent deserves +5, Insightful.
Not -1, Flamebait, if that's what you're thinking.
...in the title. In an effort to increase the efficiency of knee-jerk reactions, I propose Slashdot design and use a new symbol whenever Microsoft is mentioned. Possibly a yellow Star of David patch might be used.
P.S. The article says absolutely nothing, though the reading list may have some merit.
"SPAM" is Bulk Unsollicited Commercial E-Mail.
Stop confusing SPAM with Junk Mail. You're worse than CNN.
I showed this type of paragraph to several of my Japanese co-workers, who are very good at English but not quite native level yet. They had an extremely difficult time making out the words and couldn't grasp the meaning of the whole paragraph at all.
A lot of reading comprehension comes from how you learned the language in the first place. Your ability to understand a given second language depends on how similar it is to your native language.
I think in this case its mostly a vocabulary problem. Native speakers know that "wlohe" and "raed" are not English words, and our minds can easily search for possible alternatives, but non-native speakers would need a dictionary to confirm that those aren't actually words they didn't know.
Yes, there are some cool examples. However, if a person jumbles up the letters of a word, knowing what the original word is, they may be subconscieously keeping a pattern which denotes the original word. This pattern is how we read. Changing the letters' order in a more mechanical way (as was done by the researchers at British Columbia) seems to produce less readable text.
What the research by Cambridge Uni may show is that it is not the exact ordering of letters that we recognise.
Anyone who is dyslexic would be able to tell them that for nothing!
One issue I have with all of these studies is that they don't examine how people read non-Roman (and closely related like Cyrillic and Greek) scripts. Reading ideographs (Chinese characters/kanji) is quite different from reading a phonetic script. One of the things I've always hated about psychology (I have a B.A. in Cognitive Science. so I've suffered through plenty of psych classes) is the willingness to draw sweeping conclusions from tiny, homogenous sample sets (a typical psychology study uses 10 college students for its sample).
What is really stinks is the fact that this information was realized a couple of weeks ago by a different group. (I am sure someone has the slashdot link to it but I am to lazy) But I guess it is the best that Microsoft can do in all areas. Wait for a discovery by someone else wait a week to make sure it is true, then say that they invented it and pat themselves on the back.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"People don't he says, recognise whole-word shapes."
/. disproves that hypothesis.
There is so many errors with that sentence, I don't even know where to begin.
The FAQ entry"Why didn't you post my story?" lists " Confusing or hysterical sounding writeup" as one of the possible reasons a story wasn't posted. To bad Taco doesn't read his own FAQ, as this post as well as 75% of the other posts wouldn't make it to the front page.
Slashdot is supposed to be a "geek" site. You'd assume "geeks" would have proper grammar. But I guess
A VIRUS IS NOT A CHAIN LETTER!
Seriously, who would mod this person up? Is he using AOL's Internal Web Browser to post on AOL?
in fact, its actually MORE accurate than whole word shapes and the tpyo study. if people were recognizing word-shapes, end-loading words with larger letters like syllabl to sayblll would decrease recognition.
using feature (letter) based recognition, words can be ridiculously out of order and still be recognized because every feature except for order is being activated.
think of it like this: every word in our head has a feature pattern, in fact, for simplicity, just assume that thats how it is stored. so the word "people" has all the features (curves, lines, order, etc) stored. when you read a word, your eye recognizes parts of this immediately (sometimes on the order or ~70ms, or the time it takes for the image to get from your eye to your visual cortex). some of these features will be missed, but most will be activated. then your brain picks out a word that matches the features you have activated.
basically, these dont conflict.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
If I told you that the human brain was an amazing pattern-recognition machine, would you give me a nobel prize? I think not.
Pattern recognition is how we make decisions every day. Our brain does not compute every possible outcome of a situation, it merely takes previous experiences and extrapolates on them.
This is the same reason that brain activity drops off after two years of age. The brain has developed and stored enough patterns to make "informed" decisions. We do not have to re-learn these patterns, only refer back to them, so brain development slows down.
Your paragraph only reinforces this. We see each word in the paragraph, and based on the context in which we see the word, we make educated guesses at what the next word should be. We check back to the patterns which we have already created, and verify that we have chosen the correct action.
This is the reason why you can look at your e-mail and see what is spam and what is proper better than your computer. This is the same principle for face recognition. We equate somebody's face with our previous experiences, people we know, and make immediate judgements of that person based on skin colour, eye placement, hair colour, hair style, face shape, etc. That's why people have an "Honest" face. In fact, most people that you consider to be honest, look more like you than people you consider dishonest. For me, this is why I would sooner believe Bill Clinton then I would have Marin Luthor King. (and before I get crucified on this one, my true opinion is that Bill Clinton was a slimy weasel used car salesman and M.L.K. was perhaps one of the greatest non-manufactured heroes of the twentieth century)
This is not startling news, this is only a pattern which we have put a name to and examined.
The fact is that the process described here, wich is not such a new hypothesis, extends itself to the relationship between words, the brain building permanently and in a parallel way plausible meanings for the sentence being read. The same occurs for letter recognition (see D. Hofstadter for that), and, more generally even, is a strong hypothesis for every pattern recognition. The main obstacle in understanding this way of functionning is the naive similarity between thinking and the flood of a river, with a"before" and an "after" spatialy divided. In fact, the brain working appears to be rather a mutual information and corrections interchange between neural networks, oscillating until they have "found" a state of equilibrium, i.e of less energy.
This horribly parsed passage is an email I received forwarded to me: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer > in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht > the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. > > The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit > porbelm. > > Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, > but the wrod as a wlohe. > > amzanig huh?
Esoteric reference.
was really difficult on words over, say, five characters in length until I figured out that they were reversing the internal letters. Then it was easy to write them properly and figure out what was being said.
I was amazed at how much more difficult it was than the first example, which could be read at nearly full speed
I can read this sentence almost instantly and i am not english native, neither is my home language directly related to english language (Latin based). But on the other hand I read very easily english (although I write it with a lot errors).
I think this has partly to do with *how* you learnt english , but not whether it is your home language or not. (Heck I understand english humor perfectly like Discworld tongue-in-cheek humor whereas some Australian friend do not understand it). By "how" I mean how you read any word even in your own language !
Believe me or not I know I read by "grasping" what the phonem of a word are, and not necessaraly in a linear order. For example when i read a word which i do not know at all, I realize I read 1st phonem , then 3rd and 4th then 2nd etc... And not 1st , then 2nd, then 3rd. I also read book very quick with a full comprehension of what is written.
This seems to me to be pointing that "reading" might be far more complicated than most people describe it,might be education and cultural related, and depend on other factor. Such as training, whether you find pleasure in it or not, and (tadam) whether you learnt the language on your own without using somebody else method (as in my case with english : self taught).
It might be interressant to compare how people learn foreign language and then compare how they read *jumblewd* word out of those foreign language. it might give better conclusion than using native reader recognition of words.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
(NT)
Is there some reason why he is a "Microsoft Psychologist"? Sure, he may be associated with them, but does it really have anything to do with this article?
I'm sure it was meant to be interpreted that he was an "Evil Psychologist", and that we should disagree with his blasphemous comments about our beloved "can yuo raed tihs" word-shape slashdot karma whores.
Go ahead, mod me down...
it's irrelevant. it's the feeling surrounding the pronunciation of the discerned text, that rattails yOUR fauxking greed/fear based corepirate nazi fuddite bones.
.asp. more like nazi gestapo hypenosys massturds of deception.
how many ways can you 'discover' to say 'you must now buy this'? 1000's @leased. that's how greed/fear based felons can continue to be billyonerrors.
m$ psychologist? my
no mention there of J.'s failing attention span?
carry on. consult with/trust in yOUR creator.
the wwword games of the phonIE ?pr? ?firm? marketeers/unprecedented evile (see also: freedumb) doesn't help.
"It takes a long time to teach the judges, legislators, and public to understand technology. Right now, they're getting a strong dose of "education" on the Internet's threats and harms, and not hearing so much about its potential. Shouts of "piracy" often outweigh consideration of how we might communicate with more open media formats, but judges like Stephen Wilson in the Grokster case are starting to listen through the shouting. We're encouraging more people to think about how the law shapes technological innovation, how the technology itself can foster creativity, and then to do something about it to advance the public interest."--
"The stability of the large world house which is ours will involve a revolution of values to accompany the scientific and freedom revolutions engulfing the earth. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing"-oriented society to a "person"-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy."
Whole Language is the high sacrament of public schooling, that you memorize words as ideographs. Ideographs as in the Chinese and Japanese languages.
In whole language, there are no roots, prefixes, suffixes, no breaking a word in syllables. The study of Latin is no longer needed, although you won't be much of a lawyer or doctor without a couple of years of it.
We're paying $7000 a year per student for rubbish? "Huked on fonix rlly wurked for me" is the NEA bumper sticker.
Of course, today's Whole Language victim has only a 500 word vocabulary upon high school graduation, as opposed to 5000+ of a 50s graduate.
I agree, context is critically important in human pattern recognition. Context appears to constrain the possible choices at each junction of reasoning. To put this in context ;) imagine a short story: you enter a room, you turn on the light, you sit down in your chair. At the "you turn on the light" action, one of the possible branches in that story is not getting a drink from the water cooler. Your choices at that junction are limited by the context, or an analogy of "this leads to that".
Shh.
Ever notice how you can read chicken scratch handwriting usually pretty easily? I know when I take notes in class its usually the first letter, then some sort of semblance of letters in the middle and the last letter is usually right. Given the context, almost anybody can read these notes even though they are usually no more than some lines with an ocassional random dot above them...
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementia (There is no great genius without a mixture of madness) - Aristotle
It makes sense that it would be someone from that school, if it in fact was, as they already had a good example of this floating around:
A Sergeant of the Lawe, war and wys,
That often hadde been at the Parvys,
Ther was also, ful riche of excellence.
Discreet he was and of greet reverence-
He semed swich, his wordes weren so wise.
Justice he was ful often in assise,
By patente and by pleny comissioun.
For his science and for his heigh renoun,
Of fees and robes hadde he many oon.
Any of the normal American or English college students who have read The Canterbury Tales in Middle English (there are most likely high school students too) problably didn't find this study too shocking.
And while "patente" refers to a letter of appointment from the king, this does sound like the type of guy that would be patenting moving a mouse to the left these days...
This is very worrisome. I believe Microsoft is planning a proprietary version of English called Amerispeak.Net. It requires activation, acceptance of a huge license agreement and uses proprietary nouns in a new sentence structure that is not documented anywhere. Microsoft is showing big customers the new sentence structure, but you and I will have to reverse engineer it. And you can bet, the second we do, Microsoft will change the rules again.
In other words, Mr. Larson's subjects move their lips when they read.
Were they all Microsoft programmers, by any chance?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I don't think we really need to go any farther than Chinese to deduce that people recognize words from their shape more than from individual components of the shape.
Not that I've read the article or anything . . .
Someone you trust is one of us.
Has anybody considered applying this sort of stuff to computer algorithms? Not neccesarily this alone or specifically, but in general. This seems to say a lot about how the human mind works, and we still see the human mind in many ways far outpacing computers. In fact, in most things which are small-scale and not straight-computation, the human mind is incredibly superior.
Is there any research into applying these studies of the ways in which the mind works to making computer algorithms which emulate the human mind?
I suppose there are already perfectly good electronic readers out there, but this seems to be a general statement about human thought, not something specific to reading. Humans view things as encapsulated wholes, rather than ordered wholes.
Can computers be made to operate like this, accepting something with disorganized interiors as identical to something with organized interiors, if the interiors are the same?
On a similar note, which should a computer consider more similar, a scrambled interior, or an erroneous interior? For example, which of these two are most similar:
emxalpe
example
exame
If comparing straight difference between the ends, the first has the same contents, but is 100% different if you include organization. The other, however, is 60% the same and only 40% different. Which should an algorithm consider more correct?
Hmm...maybe Slashdot isn't the place to ask this question.
Why not let some John Edwards Material on, Or how bout Horroscopes, A little phrenology wouldnt be a bad thing.
When did Slashdot become about the joke sciences ?
I have noted this previously, but on an aged thread: it seems that a simple inversion of the internal characters of a word is the worst case of internal letter rearrangement (i.e., the aggregate displacement of letters is maximised in the inversion). So we should have predicted that the inversion is hardest to read. Of course, by hardest, I mean compared to other internal jumblings--the text was still quite simple to read!
Note also that larger words have more possible combinations of rearrangement, and average a higher aggregate displacement... and the UBC 'counter example', in fine post-secondary form, uses big words.
This is completely off-topic, but I'd like to suggest that the fact that Microsoft has a Cognitive Psychologist (many, I am sure) on their staff is why their GUIs are far superior to those hacked out by open source coders, who are good developers but do not have the design and cognitive psych. knowledge necessary to produce a genuinely intuitive interface.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
o how i wish i had mod points, this 1 hits it on the nale
tihs is old... awyanys, jwz (the aothur of xscarevsneer) has witetrn a prel app for dinog tihs... fun to aonny plpoee wtih :)
http://www.jwz.org/hacks/scrmable.pl
AOL users have been writing like that for years, so how is this news?
-t
So who cares that this guy is from Microsoft? Was he telling us about their new product which will come out next week? I mean, if the subject had anything to do with a software company, then I'd understand, but given the typical slashdot reaction on any article mentioning anything Microsoft, I don't think it makes sense to mention it. Well, at least not in the headline.
Or does the submitter mean we shouldn't trust this story? He'd need a bit more convincing argument for me ;-)
As long as I know, we recognize words as pictures. ...) and we are still able to recognize them.
Just think about how people change through time (get old, fat, thin,
I think that this is the same mechanism that we use for recognizing words. As long as the word doesn't completly change it's shape, length and letters we can still identify it's meaning.
Look people, enough grumbling about Microsoft and their psychology department... as a corporation who's main product is a human-machine interface, it is in their best interest to understand and maximize everything that eases these tasks.
...
They studied eye strain, and whipped up an improved font display system called ClearType. Windows XP has a Speech module in the control panel that's getting pretty good at speaking random text. Word and their Spelling modules are pretty good, but English isn't the only language.
Microsoft is obviously positioning itself for something big. Is this a new phase for improving Spell Checking - mimic the brain's methods for decoding scrambled text into a word? Is it time for Microsoft to take on Babelfish's language conversion -- on-the-fly language converting instant messaging with better results. New OCR technology for converting text embedded in images? Whatever it is, there's money to be made.
Finally, don't you find it ironic that an article on word recognition contains spelling errors?
2: The reader recognbises each letter in turn
ooBm B .s
:r: Whpsrda-oe is catircil in wrnioindeg
!mSau
oo, we dn'ot konw the things we know. Kevin Laorsn set auobt dirysonetg smoe of our ftvuriaoe anesoisrts in his tlak 'hTe phycoglosy of word rniongcetoi' on Saatudry mPnigeotr
o
nd on 27 Spbemeter 2003 by Mrak Bratart, V
eTvh
u
naroc
e Ntroh Bnuldiig lertuce room was pkaced, wtih eevn the aged and einmnet (nduilncig Robret Biunghsrrt, Pnrdiseet Bttay and your rrteerop) feocrd to sit on the folor for what poiemsrd to be some knid of swwoohdn bteween the bteecoa-nnur phocilgtossys and the hmsnuait gatlest rspreneteed by the arsoersrfsttctai-pn tyhaprogpy cn
yuo
Imim
t.n fact Kvein, a dfralcegisuly yunog citniovge poshlycogy grdutaae on Mo'rofcsits Acanvedd Reaidng Tnhicueqes team, gave a qeuit, asuersd, fiersnoc dciosetisn of the edecnive whcih srptopus or undemnreis the terhe main hetoyshpes aobut how the reingtoocin of wdros - and tuhs raenidg - hnhr
espaep.Te ae
1
ot2c
-or: The rdeaer rbeicneosgs each leettr in trun (lslriaye) and then asmlsebes a w3
d
or: The rdaeer regciosnes ecah of the leetrts at the same tmie (in parelall) and aeslsmbes a wrovd
ei
.
Kn ptrseened the encdevie whcih srtpopus and umnendeirs or fsleafiis each of teshe pioprtoiosnops, on the way ainsdsdreg most of the onbijotecs which tprgeyprohas are llieky to r.
T
haise
e bottom lein: on the wehigt of edvcinee, Kievn sutropps the 'paaellrl letter rinoegionct' medol. Peploe d'not he says, rosgience wwroel-ohd shepas. Isenatd the rioncegse ecah of the ltteer cmoonenpts and tehn make a series of beegtus-esss on the iriotmfaonn rretenud to alssbeme, fsrit, phoenmes and then w
.
s
rdhoTe cuomalr of qtnoeisus auobt this was far too gerat for the tmie alvealiba: Kievn ciamls to be winlilg to conuitne the docssuisin in the cirrdoros and alue-osehs of VlcInrtcea
.
nivaunoe
ldy, he netod taht the woidoir-negoctrn medol is 'rdtosnadehh' as 'Bouam' in the type cutnomimy, wchih he fdins puzznlig. He pntios out that Bauo'ms reaecrsh deos not - and does not cliam to - supropt the wniioogortr-decn meodl.
...is to make people see a BSOD and think, "Yum, candy!"
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
If you want to look at more text that has been rearranged in this fashion, you can scramble the website of your choice at: www.scramblizer.com.
Not for me, I have been using English only for a few years and I had absolutely no trouble reading the counterexample paragraph (my native language uses western characters).
I am disappointed that Kevin Larson and RenderMonkey so casually disregarded my post to slashdot from the last story:
Many of our internal language comprehension algorithms seem to be ruled by stacks.
No, I'm not trying to say that we're a giant push-down-automata. There are various intermediaries between a push-down-automata and a full Turing machine. Some of the observable bottlenecks in human speech seem to suggest that we've got some kind of stack-based automata doing our language processing. Something like the "Bottom-up embedded push-down automata."
It would make plenty of sense that due to our habit of reading left to right, when reading a long word with reversed internal letters, we'd have to push every single letter. By the time we get to the second to last letter, we have some hope of popping and interpretting the word, but all our buffers are blown already. Too much of our language processing logic is occupied.
If it's a simple jumble, then there's fewer letters we need to push into the stack before we can start popping and understanding the words. If you have trouble with the whole word, you can start working on the next word, interpret that, and then keep popping use that information to guide your interpretation of the first word.
This makes sense, really. I swear. Someone tell me they follow what I'm saying.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
My hunch is that you'll probably have different results, mainly because the roman script is not as phonetic as, say, Brahmi-derived scripts, are.
More than mere navel gazing.
Love him or hate him, the controversy on /. about RMS has *NOTHING* to do with his knowledge of physics.
What about the 50 billion other "models" for human perception that psychologists pulled out of their asses to get their doctorates? Every little model has its own supporting evidence, and none of the proponents of these various models are interested in trying to explain anyone else's observations. (It's not like they're claiming to be scientists or anything, so why should they try and explain as many observations as possible?) Why is this model more valid than any other one?
Psychologists don't get that a real scientific model will attempt to explain all observations with the least number of terms possible. The sheer number of different perceptual models floating around after decades of study is the absolute antithesis of how science should work.
After reading numerous posts by fellow slash dotters, I'm not amazed that I can read that with little to no difficulty. I mean, if you can't read that, you're probably confused every time you come here.
I only had no trouble with the words that had the taller letters (eg. t,b,d,l) in the approximately correct place, but I did have a bit of trouble with the ones that had those messed up. However, I am dyslexic and so might be a special case.
I should have said interresting instead of interressant. This day with all the french-hating I avoid saying I am french and use instead circumlocution ("Latin-based" language hehe).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The antecedents of ClearType.
cheers- raga
This science coverage is always the worst kind of journalism.
Everytime a reporter writes up a story about something as mundane as a run of the mill scientific lecture, they have to hype the living hell out of it, as if they've just witnessed Newton giving the first public presentation of his ideas about gravity.
And a fine job calling psychologists bean-counters and the typographists "humanist". (and an *especially* fine job using the instead of they in para 5! It's not like writing correctly is your *job* or anything, and for the atypi too! jesus)
Well here's one for the budding genius to consider: the word scrambling data directly contradicts the phoneme assembly theory he mentions as being supported by the data.
For some reason, the idea of Microsoft having a psychologist and studying language just gives me a picture of a scene from 1984 where the Newspeak dictionary is being discussed.
The reasons given for why humans recognize words is erroneous, because the Meaning / Content Doesn't Exist merely in what you See; their unity is first given only in conceptual form our cognition.
here's a little background, if you actually care to be thorough about such matters...
best regards,
john.
--| Thought as a Perceptual Instrument for Ideas |---
Does thinking even have any content if you disregard all visible reality, if you disregard the sense-perceptible world of phenomena? Does there not remain a total void, a pure phantasm, if we think away all sense-perceptible content?
That this is indeed the case could very well be a widespread opinion, so we must look at it a little more closely. As we have already noted above, many people think of the entire system of concepts as in fact only a photograph of the outer world. They do indeed hold onto the fact that our knowing develops in theform of thinking, but demand nevertheless that a 'strictly objective science' take its content only from outside. According to them the outer world must provide the substance that flows into our concepts. Without the outer world, they maintain, these concepts are only empty schemata without any content. If this outer world fell away, concepts and ideas would no longer have any meaning, for they are there for the sake of the outer world. One could call this view the negation of the concept. For then the concept no longer has any significance at all for the objective world. It is something added onto the latter. The world would stand there in all its completeness even if there were no concepts. For they in fact bring nothing new to the world. They contain nothing that would not be there without them. They are there only because the knowing subject wants to make use of them in order to have, in a form appropriate to this subject, that which is otherwise already there. For this subject, they are only mediators of a content that is of a non-conceptual nature. This is the view presented.
If it were justified, one of the following three presuppositions would have to be correct.
1. The world of concepts stands in a relationship to the outer world such that it only reproduces the entire content of this world in a different form. Here 'outer world' means the sense world. If that were the case, one truly could not see why it would be necessary to lift oneself above the sense world at all. The entire whys and wherefores of knowing would after all already be given along with the sense world.
2. The world of concepts takes up, as its content, only a part of 'what manifests to the senses.' Picture the matter so~nething like this. We make a series of observations. We meet there with the most varied objects. In doing so we notice that certain characteristics we discover in an object have already been observed by us berore. Our eye scans a series of objects A, B, C, D, etc. A has the characteristics p, q, a, r; B: 1, m, b) n; C: k h, c, g; and D: p, u, a, v. In D we again meet the characteristics a and p, which we have already encountered inA. We designate these characteristics as essential. And insofar as A and D have the same essential characteristics, we say that they are of the same kind. Thus we bringA and D together by holding fast to their essential characteristics in thinking. There we have a thinking that does not entirely coincide with the sense world, a thinking that therefore cannot be accused of being superfluous as in the case of the first presupposition above; nevertheless it it still just as far from bringing anything new to the sense world. But one can certainly raise the objection to this that, in order to recognize which characteristics of a thing are essential, there must already be a certain norm making it possible to distinguish the essential from the inessential. This norm cannot lie in the object, for the object in fact contains both what is essential and inessential in undivided unity. Therefore this nor
[error in posting, sorry; corrections follow]
The reasons given for why humans recognize words is erroneous, because the Meaning / Content Doesn't Exist merely in what you See; their unity is first given only in conceptual form to our cognition.
here's a little background, if you actually care to be thorough about such matters...
best regards,
john.
--| Thought as a Perceptual Instrument for Ideas |---
Does thinking even have any content if you disregard all visible reality, if you disregard the sense-perceptible world of phenomena? Does there not remain a total void, a pure phantasm, if we think away all sense-perceptible content?
That this is indeed the case could very well be a widespread opinion, so we must look at it a little more closely. As we have already noted above, many people think of the entire system of concepts as in fact only a photograph of the outer world. They do indeed hold onto the fact that our knowing develops in theform of thinking, but demand nevertheless that a 'strictly objective science' take its content only from outside. According to them the outer world must provide the substance that flows into our concepts. Without the outer world, they maintain, these concepts are only empty schemata without any content. If this outer world fell away, concepts and ideas would no longer have any meaning, for they are there for the sake of the outer world. One could call this view the negation of the concept. For then the concept no longer has any significance at all for the objective world. It is something added onto the latter. The world would stand there in all its completeness even if there were no concepts. For they in fact bring nothing new to the world. They contain nothing that would not be there without them. They are there only because the knowing subject wants to make use of them in order to have, in a form appropriate to this subject, that which is otherwise already there. For this subject, they are only mediators of a content that is of a non-conceptual nature. This is the view presented.
If it were justified, one of the following three presuppositions would have to be correct.
1. The world of concepts stands in a relationship to the outer world such that it only reproduces the entire content of this world in a different form. Here 'outer world' means the sense world. If that were the case, one truly could not see why it would be necessary to lift oneself above the sense world at all. The entire whys and wherefores of knowing would after all already be given along with the sense world.
2. The world of concepts takes up, as its content, only a part of 'what manifests to the senses.' Picture the matter so~nething like this. We make a series of observations. We meet there with the most varied objects. In doing so we notice that certain characteristics we discover in an object have already been observed by us berore. Our eye scans a series of objects A, B, C, D, etc. A has the characteristics p, q, a, r; B: 1, m, b) n; C: k h, c, g; and D: p, u, a, v. In D we again meet the characteristics a and p, which we have already encountered inA. We designate these characteristics as essential. And insofar as A and D have the same essential characteristics, we say that they are of the same kind. Thus we bringA and D together by holding fast to their essential characteristics in thinking. There we have a thinking that does not entirely coincide with the sense world, a thinking that therefore cannot be accused of being superfluous as in the case of the first presupposition above; nevertheless it it still just as far from bringing anything new to the sense world. But one can certainly raise the objection to this that, in order to recognize which characteristics of a thing are essential, there must already be a certain norm making it possible to distinguish the essential from the inessential. This norm cannot lie in the object, for the object in fact contains both what is essenti
In typography classes i've taken, I've been taught that we read word shapes, not all the letters, that's why the first and last letter correct words seem to work, especially with short words.
Read and Raed have the same shape, as well as similarly shapped characters. "a" and "e" are both roughly round in shape, as such they read are quite interchangeable.
When the word becomes much longer the subtle differences in have a greater effect.
Take "reading" for example:
"rnediag" might work, but "rianedg" does not.
replacing some similarly shapped letters actually seems to be more effective. i.e. "rsedimg"
"rxxdixg" can be read as "reading" relatively easily, especially within context, "rixxxdg" is much less likely to.
Actually "rxxdixg" more easily reads as asd "reading" than "rnediag" for me, so having all the letters is much less important than the shape.
Could our ability to read mixed up words be one that is learned by frequent exposure to misstyped words?
"Teh" the a very common typo despite being so common, is still rather dificult to read a "The", another good example of the above.
My subtext is just a figment of your imagination.
The reasons why the situation is as it is are many. One of them is the complexity of the matter researched - psychology is supposed to be the science of human mind, but it's not even clear what exactly is the object it is studying.
The other reason (connected with the first) may be, that psychology (and other "soft" sciences) haven't exactly had a fundamental basis to what they are studying, whereas the "hard" sciences could rely on physics (and mathematics?) as the basis to everything. Some claim that semiotics (the study of signs) could be the "physics of the 21st century", I wouldn't mind at all if it were so.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
People use a whole series of mechinisms to interpret the visual wavefront reaching there eyes. When the first fails, another is tried, then another. It has to do with our hunter/gatherer past. Humans are very good at abstracting pattern, such as the disruption in the distrubution of detritus on a game trail. Humans will always first try to match the WHOLE pattern, i.e. the word shape, befor resorting to slower methods, i.e. phonen recognition. Sounding out the letters is the last resort.
The human mind, and probably the generalised animal mind, uses sets of algorithms. The fastes is used first. Then fallbacks are tried in turn untill the cognition is accomplished. This guy is a cognative phycologist, and he does not understand this?
Many thanks to anyone who can help.
Perhaps they're trying to figure out exaclty how the brain figures it out as a whole. Not if it does or not.
It's always such a laugh how people on /. automaticly jump to conclusions, pulling anything out their ass, when the person in the artical has probably spent the last year or so actually researching it.
I let a friend of mine that is dyslectic read the text. And he read it without a single mistake!!!
;)
But he did not see that the text was full of misspellings. I had to tell him to read it over and over again, untill he finaly saw that the text didnt spell out correctly.
Maybe this is a new way of making dyslectics read?
I certainly cannot read what is said below. I ommitted the non first and non last characters by replacing them with a non 'junk character.' "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."
Raaaaaaaaaay waaaas "In aaaaaar faaaaw-up to Can Yau Raad Taas? Maaaaaaat's Kaaan Laaaan, a caaaaaaae paaaaaaaaaat, daaaaaaad tae maan haaaaaaaas on haw we raad at AaaaI's Vaaaaaaar Taaaaaaaay caaaaaaaae. "Kaaan saaaaaas tae 'paaaaaal laaaar raaaaaaaaan' maaal. Paaaae dan't he saas, raaaaaaae waaae-waad saaaas. Iaaaaad tae raaaaaaae eaah of tae laaaar caaaaaaaas aad taan maae a saaaas of baat-gaaaaas on tae iaaaaaaaaan raaaaaad to aaaaaaae, faaat, paaaaaas aad taan waaas." So waat aaaat tae caae of paaaaaaad re-oaaaaaag, aaa tae caaaaar eaaaaae to Can Yau Raad Taas?"
There's a French version of this floating around, and I had no problems reading it, even though my French is pretty bad. (I'm just learning it.) I could'nt get two words right off the bat, because it turns out that I don't know those two words at all, but the rest came as fast as the English version.
I think the key here is that the foreigners (Japanese) were people who speak a pictograph language (correct term?). I think anyone who speaks a language based roughly off of the roman alphabet will have no problem with a version of this for any language that they know that uses the roman alphabet...
I wonder how much faster 2nd grade teachers can read this stuff..
...From the same psych experts who brought you Clippy, it's the new "Microsoft Hmuan Lgnuagae Kyeborad" No longer do you need to have l33t typing sk1llz to type like a pro! The new Microsoft Hmuan lgnuagae Kyeborad can automatically analyze the phenomes you're typing and correct your spelling errors while you type! Act now through this special TV offer, and you'll also get "Clippy Pro 2003", your favorite animated helper with over 2GB of new animations!
You, o strange one, are my hero.
When are you going to sign up for an account so we can have all your posts in one place?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
I just updated my personal site with my take on the situation, but in summary:
Reading is an extremely complex function. Typography, cognitive psychology and physiology have all made excellent contributions to understanding the process, but as yet we still do not empirically know exactly how reading functions. Word shape - both the external outline and the internal contrast - do affect legibility and reading, but it can be shown that the letter -> phoneme -> word hypothesis is a major factor as well. I believe that the reality is that reading is mix of the models. The physiology of reading is fairly well documented, we focus at a point and "read" in a span of 4-6 letter spaces left and 12-16 letter spaces right of the focus point. The focus scan time is reportedly 50-200ms. In that space we read the word shape and the letter forms simultaneously. When we recognize the word shape, from memory or by context, we discard the rest and move on. Otherwise we assemble the letters into phonemes and awords using context and experience. If that fails we rescan the word and if need be switch to a serialized reading of the individual letter forms to constuct the phonemes and word. This is most common with extremely long compound words and completely foreign words.
...can only be understood by people on LSD
Microsoft just announced their new "Wiwnods" product line. Quoth a MS spokesman 'Ah, most people won't even notice the difference'
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
Excuse me, but I suspect said 'psychologist' was either hand-picked by MS for his willingness to assume all human perception can be pigeon-holed into a single pattern OR he is a mole from their tech-support area, aiming to rationalize their arbitrary and often inane predictions about human reasoning when they design tech support 'playlists.' One's job becomes much easier if you have some hard-set parameters, no? The Cambridge example is an interesting counter-example to demonstrate elasticity of perception, but I'm sure there are some entirely different, equally conclusive counter-examples. My own limited experience in teaching reading and in being off the neuro-typical spectrum is that there are layers of perceptual tools that different people use to varying degrees depending upon their particular brain functioning.
cognitive neuro-physiologist? considering that is what he is talking about rather than marriage problems?
hmmmm... a psychologist doing scientific observations of some kind. shouldn't he be reporting on the mating habits of the win-dodo or something?
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
It's a product that trains you to recognize words, sentences and paragraphs as whole objects.
There's a free demo online in flash.
It's called EyeQ, by InfiniteMind.
Pretty cool, methinks. I've increased my peripheral vision with it and noticed some improvement in reading speed.
ChopSueyAR
The problem is that no effort has been made or apparently will be made to develop a complete model for how perception works. The proponents of each model just keep finding things which prove them right, rather than trying to truly test their model by actually finding a way to disprove it.
BS, see Jacobs A. M. & Grainger J. (1994). Models of visual word recognition: Sampling the state of the art. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 20(6): 1311-1334.
as for your other points: yes, admittedly all is not well and a lot of psychologists are rather weak on maths. But your sweeping generalisations are just plain wrong, especially since the standard of hypothesis testing in psychology is the Popperian notion of falsifiability. (see e.g. Jacobs, A. M., Graf, R. & Kinder, A. (2003). Receiver operating characteristics in the lexical decision task: Evidence for a simple signal-detection process simulated by the multiple read-out model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory & Cognition, 29(3), 481-488.)* I suggest you learn some nuance from psychologists, since this seems something _you_ are incapable of.
for a recent take on word shape see
Perea, M., & Rosa, E. (2002). Does "whole word shape" play a role in visual word recognition? Perception and Psychophysics, 64, 785-794. [pdf] from Manolo Perea's homepage
For a take from someone who used to believe in the importance of letter order (I can't really tell what his opinion is these days), see Max Coltheart's homepage (no downloads, but googling "coltheart pdf" gives some decent results). Max came up with the doual-route-model, and it is actually rather suspicious, that Kevin Larson doesn't quote him, since he is in many ways the godfather of visual word recognition research. (For a takedown of Max's main points see Van an Orden, G. C., Pennington, B. F., & Stone, G. O. (2001). What do double dissociations prove? Cognitive Science, 25, 111-172.[pdf] from Guy Van Orden's homepage (his main opponent, who miraculously also was not mentioned by Larson)
Bevahioral Research Methods, Instruments and Computers? Nice to have you here; any chance you could get back to me on the paper I recently submitted on head-related transfer functions? Ta ;-)
I was at the ATypI conference and attended both presentations by Kevin Larson, a Ph.D. in reading acquisition (a domain in cognitive psychology) who does in fact work for Microsoft.
Larson's first paper, on measuring the readability of ClearType, was poorly received by attendees, who virtually tore him limb from limb. "And that," he said then, "was the uncontroversial paper." The second presentation, which explained that the theory of word recognition by shape or outline is poorly supported by evidence, was one that I anticipated would lead to even greater bloodletting by the packed house of professional graphic and type designers, but in fact the enormous range of scientific papers Larson abstracted for us was entirely convincing.
I chatted with Larson and his colleagues at quite considerable length. He is a sincere person with a solid pedigree. It's difficult for average people to cross-check his many references (which were posted at the ATypI site), but based on the thoroughness of his presentation and my talking to him, I am willing to vouch for what he says.
The rather juvenile ad hominem attacks on this fellow are uncalled for here.
I certainly don't understand why Larson hasn't posted his whole PowerPoint presentations at Microsoft Typography, but perhaps we can persuade him. I didn't take notes in his two sessions because they required full attention and because I foolishly expected his own notes to be posted. Perhaps they will later.
As I explained to Larson, the world of professional graphic design has two periods: Before September 27, 2003 and after. We went from believing the word-shape theory (known as boumas after Bouma [pronounced "Bowma," not "Booma"], the Dutch psychologist) to believing the theory that has the greatest evidence. I call that rationality.
Joe Clark | http://joeclark.org/weblogs/
I think it depends on the area you're working in. It's next to impossible to unify theories of personality because they start out from rather different philosophical angles. Maybe trying to combine semantics and syntax would be a decent analogy for the scope of the problem. In the more technical area of cognitive psychology the main problems are again more technical. For instance, trying to unify qualitative flow-diagram models or even quantitative models with meaningful nodes on the one hand and parallel distributed neural networks on the other hand is AFAIK technically possible, but very tricky. That said, there is also the problem of fundamental, unresolved conflicts concerning the architecture of cognition, like the question whether "representations" are necessary.
even the Gerrig and Zimbardo "Psychology and Life" -and you can't get more basic than that- touches on the idea, admittedly only in passing. I'm sorry, but as someone who has had the concept of falsifiability pushed in his face from day 1 of my study I find it somewhat hard to imagine it is not taught at your place. I'm inclined to believe either (a) the teaching you had was particularly shoddy or (b) you never went to a methodology course.
LOL. Neuropsychology has only recently begun to realise that simple additive or subtractive reasoning (Donders subtraction method, Sternberg's additive factors logic) won't get you far in cognition. And they are still prone to point to a correlate (magnetic measurement of blood flow) (that is measuring at a resolution of 1-2 images/per second) of a potential correlate (blood flow=oxygen flow=brain activity) that might correlate with the phenomenon of interest (brain activity=thinking) hoping to derive something meaningful about millisecond processes in a highly networked system from that. Doesn't mean there isn't some decent research done in that area of course.
Maslow wrote 1943/54/68/70 so you might want to find something more recent to judge the field. That said, theories of personality come in various flavours, and most of them are part of an earlier tradition that considered psychology a part of philosophical science. Considering psychology as a natural science dates back to around 1950, about halfway down the short history of the discipline. The philosophical strand continues to this day, mostly because some problems (in therapy) are too complex to be covered by the findings the more frugal, piecemeal natural science approach has so far yielded (_you_ tell the mentally ill to wait for more rigourous theories).
Those qualifiers aside, as far as I know Maslow used to check his theory against available evidence (and self-actualisation isn't the same as reaching your full potential), though of course not in a rigourous fashion. IMHO however, his lasting fame is justified by his idea that we should study successful people and not only mental illness and brain damage. Since you seem to be sympathetic to the latter approach, may I ask you to consider (a) how you justify generalising from the functioning of a damaged brain to normal functioning and (b) in what ways the reasoning from specific impairments to specifi
sorry, can't help you there. ;)
I began to use the handle after finishing undergraduate training, to honour the most useful but underrated paper out there, because it describes neatly what I do and because it makes a nice insider joke (also because my "firstborn" was meant to be a brmic paper. Unfortunately the second author is still sitting on it).
You might consider going from AC to JEP:GEN which AFAIK isn't taken yet. I should warn you though. I recently had to open a new mail account to avoid submitting a paper from a brmic@ e-mail address
Before those models can be unified with anything, they must be tested. How would you test whether or not memories are stored in every brain cell for example?
The methodology should be included in the introductory course. The course shouldn't leave you wondering about the methods psychologists use to come up with their conclusions.
I say that the field is better-pursued because it deals with linking behaviors to physical things, i.e. the brain. This makes the study much more open to testing and falsifiability. As for correlations, the entire field seems to have the problem of equating correlation to causation, if what I've seen is any indication.
good idea, I'll e-mail as soon as I can