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Method of Reading Discovered
Scientists have discovered that the method our eyes use to process letters on a page is different than previously believed. Instead of assimilating one letter at a time our eyes actually lock on to two different letters simultaneously about half the time. "The team's results demonstrated that both eyes lock on to the same letter 53% of the time; for 39% of the time they see different letters with uncrossed eyes; and for 8% of the time the eyes are crossing to focus on different letters. A follow-up experiment with the eye-tracking equipment showed that we only see one clear image when reading because our brain fuses the different images from our eyes together."
If yuo corss yuor eeys smoetemis, you sohlud be albe to raed tihs qitue eailsy. I terid it, and it mdae all the sepllnig msitaeks on salsdhot go aawy. Hvewoer, it ddi not ipormve Sttucle Mkoney's eitding.
Aoccdrnig to 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 toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
In other words, this study was flawed in the first place. Our eyes don't look at individual letters, they look at groups at a time. I learned this in high school....
"lock on to two different letters simultaneously about half the time."
...half the time, every time.
I could have sworn we knew this was where dyslexic came from, that you see two letters that don't end up in the right order in your head.
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That's pretty cool, but what about non-alphabetic systems, such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean? Does the physical act of reading depend at all on the unit of meaning we are scanning with our eyes? Not that the researchers should have done this in the same experiment, they're in England, so it makes sense for them to stick to the native language.
I've known for about 20 years that we don't focus on one letter. There are numerous books that show that we (at least those using Latin alphabets) look at the shape of the top half of the word rather than each letter. All this does is break down literacy to crossing eyes, etc. Not really new.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
You remember all that, the letter order doesn't matter when reading bit? (http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000840.php for a refresher).
It's always seemed pretty apparent to me that we don't reach letters in "correct order" by focusing only on a single one at a time. If that were the case things like speed-reading and scanning for content would be nearly impossible. Outside confirmation of this is nice however.
The real question is how much redundancy can we remove from printed words for faster information dispersal while still expressing things clearly. Sure, having everything spelled correctly and in long form is great for books for pleasure (art) but do we really need it for basic information sharing? Especially if doing so increases the time spent needlessly?
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[i]"A follow-up experiment with the eye-tracking equipment showed that we only see one clear image when reading because our brain fuses the different images from our eyes together."[/i] Wait... they neeeded a follow up experiment to discover something that is so well known that it s rather common knowledge? I mean.. the other stuff isnt actually news either but this... and how does eye-trracking lead to a RESULT about what the brain does. I mean... an eye tracking experiment leading to a thesis.. or supporting a thesis about bain function... that sounds logic to me. To sum this up.. this slashdot article is badly written in multiple aspects.
Very interesting. I wonder if this could be a contributing factor to why folks get headaches when reading on some computer screens. That is, computers, unlike books, are constantly redrawing the screen so not all of the letters may actually be visible very well at any one time. Your brain starts straining because it can't scan multiple letters (or entire words?) very well due to the flicker. Do eletronic book readers have a high refresh rate?
Reading is a process of pattern recognition. We recognize and assemble patterns of letters/symbols and then associate those patterns with meaning. Some people can recognize larger patterns at a time, other people can only recognize shorter patterns. Most people move past the "processing a single letter at a time" stage of pattern recognition at a young age. Personally, I read whole multiple words or even short sentences at a time.
This has been known for a very long time.
Typographers have used ligatures for ages. Now we have a scientific explanation.
It seems that technical documentation is often optimised to take advantage of this phenomenon. For instance, recent tests on IBM's Tivoli Access Manager docs caused my eyes to cross 130% of the time.
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I'll keep my eyes crossed for that.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
Seriously, try this one, Mr. Wizard:
From http://www.gobiged.com/wfdata/frame265-1059/pressrel45.aspThere is no internal 'viewscreen' that the brain displays the images on. (a so called "cartesian theater" ) after all, if that happens, who is watching the screen and how does that work ?
Instead of an internal 'framebuffer' I think* it's more like a MVC kind of system. Instead of pasting parts of images on an internal framebuffer to make up a whole, the individual parts are used to fill the datamodel of the world you've got inside your head. You 'see' the datamodel.
* - This is all just a bit of philosophizing on my side, I may be completely wrong.
In my defense, I must say it was really hard to proofread.
The article only touches on this (last word in the entire story), but this should have ramifications in studying and treating dyslexia. At first glance, it would seem very strange how people could suffer from dyslexia. Why would they perceive pairs of letters and numbers as flipped, if we read in a serial fashion? If both eyes aren't even looking at the same letter then the physiology begins to make more sense - somewhere along the way the information isn't being assembled in the proper order.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
OK, I'm hoping the real article is not nearly as silly as this blurb. I'm sure it talks about this situation in more reasonable terms. But the blurb focuses on eye position and implies that it has meaning on a letter level.
While the issue of eye position is interesting, we are NOT focusing on a letter. We are not reading letters, much less looking at them.
Hold you arm out. Raise your thumb. Look at it. The space of the back of your thumb, at that distance is special. That's your fovea -- the area of your eye which has the greatest acuity. When you read, depending on font size and text distance, that area covers multiple lines of text, and usually more than one word. Focusing on a letter means picking that letter as a point in the text, and seeing the areas around it.
A strong reader is picking up both the words below and left and right of the word he/she is reading at that fraction of a second.
Yes, it's interesting to ask where we fixate. Yes, it's VERY interesting that we go crosseyed and that begs the question of whether we do it systematically to reduce the amount of new data which is common in both foveas, either to increase speed by processing both independently, or to reduce the amount in common and thus reduce the load that reading takes (you'd possibly see that in a "difficult" or unfamiliar word). However, we do NOT look at letters. They're just a spot.
Someone asked here about other languages, do we do the same thing for Kanji, Hangul, etc.? Is suspect that things might be different there, as I suspect that this behavior that they've found is strongly connected with syllable boundaries in English. However, eye-trackers are notoriously inaccurate (unless you're willing to have a coil surgically implanted in your eye, and even then, it ain't fantastic) and so their letter accuracy information must come from AVERAGES ACROSS MULTIPLE OBSERVATIONS. This should lead us to ask what their dataset was and what behavior they saw on specific character clusters. (That, in turn leads us to question if they got enough data to get much accuracy on those clusters.)
It would be nice to see the original article, as opposed to this fluff piece.
Dotters read an article only 53 % of the time.
39% of the time they begin posting comments without reading the article at all.
8% of the time they read the wrong article entirely and post anyway.
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