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?"

Comments

Where's the evidence?

[Kulic]

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...

This really is not big news.

[Trigun]

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.

Handwriting Too

[Avatar889]

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...

Microsoft

[cookiepus]

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.

Re:Waht aobut Cmabrigde Uinervtisy ?

[aastanna]

Well, I am sure. Every time you changed the last letter in a word i had to stop and think about what the word was.