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MS Psychologist on How We Read 206

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can-you-raed-tihs dept.
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?"
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MS Psychologist on How We Read More

MS Psychologist on How We Read

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  • What the hell? (Score:3, Funny)

    by OverRated ( 613866 ) <overrated@optush ... u ['.co' in gap]> on Sunday September 28, 2003 @09:31AM (#7077080)
    Microsoft has a psychologist?
  • 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?
    • Did you check the links in the story?

      thats what its refering to in the first
      link, it links to a story hear on /.
      about two weeks ago..
    • I am nto so shure ti ahs to ahve teh frist and lsat lettres in teh rihgt placse if ti si a wrdo taht si splet worgn a lto, cos afert a whiel we bgeni to reocgnsie teh mis-splte wrdos.

    • Only for native English speakers... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jettoblack ( 683831 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @09:46AM (#7077151)
      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.

      • Not only for "native" speaker (Score:5, Interesting)

        by aepervius ( 535155 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @10:01AM (#7077220)
        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.
        • his seems to me to be pointing that "reading" might be far more complicated than most people describe it

          Exactly. Scientists already know that there are at least three primary ways of learning information, and people are generally stronger in one or two of them. (seeing, hearing, doing) Like in reading, a seeing learner will generally just *look* at the word and comprehend it, where a hearing learner will look at the word and then hear the word in his head.

          I'm personally VERY visual. When I speak, I

        • It might be interressant to compare...

          Sounds like your native language is French. That laguage is, in fact, latin-based (whereas English is actually considered to be Germanic).
          • My guess would have been Danish since interesting is spelled "interesant" in that language. Then again, it might just have been borrowed from French. Hard to tell.
          • 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).
            • Stand proud, friend. Once, when I was at work, some customer made fun of the beret I was wearing, so I conducted the rest of the transaction in French. He was annoyed.

              I'm proud to be American, and I'm proud that I can speak decent French. Woe betide him what disparage either to my face. : )

        • 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 p

      • An interesting exercise would be to produce a similar text in Japanese or any of the Asian languages where the position of the glyph in the word determines its characteristics (in Indic languages such as Burmese or Telugu for instance).

        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.


    • 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 [earthlink.net].

      --| 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

      • [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 [earthlink.net].

        --| Thought as a Perceptual Instrument for Ideas |---

        Does thinking even have any content if you disregard all visible reality, if you disregard the sense-perce

  • bah (Score:5, Interesting)

    by elmegil ( 12001 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @09:35AM (#7077098) Homepage Journal
    That's what you get expecting "experts" to answer any questions for 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.

    • Re:bah (Score:3, Interesting)

      by AllUsernamesAreGone ( 688381 )
      What's even worse is that I've found that the media makes a difference as well - when I print out the emails I've had with this letter mixing going on inside them I find it much more noticable and laborious to read. When I read them on the screen I barely notice the rearrangement. I guess that's what years or IRC will do to a person - I've got to the point where some spelling mistakes, abbreviations and wholesale word manglings are almost invisible.

      One interesting avenue of study would actually be to compa

    • Context. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by headkase ( 533448 )
      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".

    • Re:bah (Score:3, Informative)

      by Angram ( 517383 )
      I'm an undergrad interning in an eye-tracking lab. Suffice to say, I know a whole lot more about this than most people here. The fact is, it's going to take you a LOT longer to read the corrupt passages. All this effect illustrates is the capability of the human brain to unscramble words on-the-fly, using large amounts of context. The effect shows that that letter order is important. Heck, you could time yourself on a passage using your watch and note the difference. In eye-tracking research, word-level ef
      • The fact is, it's going to take you a LOT longer to read the corrupt passages.

        Maybe you need to quantify "a LOT" "a lot better", because it didn't take me anything like seconds vs. milliseconds to read the stuff with the letters scrambled.

    • I have reading and writing problems for years. Missing sentences, missing words, wrong sequences of words, wrong word spellings, even right words from time to time.

      But in end the end, most all can clearly get the meaning of what I write. It is a function of filtering and feed back.

      How many thime have you read something that had words in it you did not know? And were able to desern meening from the shrounding text.

      Yeah, there are speed penalities in trying to read it. But it is there.

      Now about MS havi
      • Who lays out the screen and menus? ILLITERATE SUB HUMAN KNUCKLE DRAGGING APE MEN. That's who. (Although I didn't know they were called "physcolists") And then, to make matters worse, they let the damn computer REARRANGE these menus whenever it feels like it, so I have to stare at the menus reading each item in turn, to figure out which menu option is supposed to GET RID OF THIS ABYSMALLY STUPID BEHAVIOUR.

        I don't know why they do have "physchlists" on staff, but maybe they should hire some PSYCHOLOGISTS
  • I think this is similar to what is being said and from all places I got this from an fwd email:

    This is cool! And true! I could read the whole paragraph without having to pause...amazing what the human mind can do! 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

    • This really is not big news. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Trigun ( 685027 ) <evil&evilempire,ath,cx> on Sunday September 28, 2003 @09:56AM (#7077198)
      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 way I see it you are just pronoucing the word phonetically in your head and then finding what word it sounds like.

      Try this.

      Go through the paragraph again and say it aloud slowly and phonetically as if you were a two year old just learning to read. Your mind will find words that sounds similar if you read phonetically, but if you don't know how to you will just stumble over the word.

      It just goes to prove that the word recognition way of reading that the U.S. public schools is teaching now days is very
  • 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).

    • Re:This is turning into spam (Score:5, Interesting)

      by urbazewski ( 554143 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @11:49AM (#7078030) Homepage Journal
      The spammers are already onto this one: here's the contents of a piece of spam that made it through the OS X Mail filter:
      Dpmloia Pragrom

      Ctraee a mroe prosreuops ftuure for yoerlusf

      Reviece a full dimlpoa form non acdrceited
      utiversinies baesd uopn your real lfie experceine

      You will not be tseted, or inetrviewed
      Ricevee a Metsar's, Bechaolr's or Dotocrate

      Call 24 huros a day 7 dyas a week

      Gotta teach that filter to read more like a human.
      • It gets past the spam filter, sure, but it really makes me wonder, who on earth would ever click on that?

        I recently got a spam that combined "you are a winner" with viagra, porn, and something else -- I couldn't even figure out what it was they were trying to sell. I'm not sure even they knew.

        I wonder if the spammers aren't getting a little self-defeating in trying to get past the filters.
      • You know......for as much as we all hate spammers......sometimes you just have to give them a LITTLE credit. It's pretty creative how this study was just published, and already they are incorporating it into their "service delivery plan". It's kind of funny how the RIAA won't change its business model over its dead body, and here the spammers are, adapting their business strategy to whatever they can to try to make money. Now granted, its not necessarily a good thing about how they do it....but it's rare

      • "Gotta teach that filter to read more like a human."

        No need for another potential Skynet. If you can make the Bayesian filters recognize this type of 'mutilation', have it filter it. I for one wouldn't want to read anything of the kind, not even as a joke.

        (Disclamier: I'm against Bayesian filtering and for prosecuting Spammers and for trying to fix the e-mail system.)

  • oh Gawd.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mr.Zong ( 704396 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @09:41AM (#7077126)
    Great....a justification for Leet speak...

    • Re:oh Gawd.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by kurosawdust ( 654754 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @10:52AM (#7077602)
      t3h f|3xiBi|+y 0f teh hu/\/\@n /\/\inD 0\/\/ns j00!
      • The interesting this when trying to translate this sentence was that I first tried to parse it one character at a time I had a real tought time. My five seconds of patience was about to give up when glanced at the whole thing at once and the translation came immediately to me. Kind of cool how the brain matches patterns.
        • Hmm... Is this an argument for word-shapes? It certainly sounds like evidence against serial letter reading (though there are plenty of those already).
  • 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
    • given the immense support for paralell letter recognition in vast amounts of psychological and linguistic research, id say your brain is still working in paralell, but at some point in your "serial" search you are taking the time to focus on each letter on lower input levels.
  • 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

  • Where's the evidence? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Kulic ( 122255 )

    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 [slashdot.org] but what about the rest of the rules to flesh this out? What rules do we need to follow

    • I must say that personally, I'm not convinced of the slashdot-favorite counter-example at all. For all we know, what it shows is a DOS attack on a poorly implemented regular expression our brain is solving... or to put it more scientifically, maybe the time it takes for us to decipher the letters has a best case scenario (the word is a complete match) and a worst case scenario (the letters are simply reversed).

    • The counter-example only reenforces the claim. Of course there is no black and white rule for which scramblings we can read. Why would there be?

      It looks to me like proximity of the letters to their original positions is the best indicator for whether we will be able to understand the result. But also, the words flow into each other, so I'm sure it's important that we are able to recognize "phenomenal" from the get-go.

      Bizarre pattern recognition rules don't apply uniquely to words. In my Psych 101 text, th

  • Bkcollos (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Dewin Cymraeg ( 607476 )
    The counter claim seems to prove quite conclusively that it is not a universal rule that the ordering of the middle letters of a word is immaterial.

    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 les

    • The 'counter example' proves the universal rule, if anything, no? Was the original claim not that we can read the internally-jumbled text without much difficulty? I do not recall anyone claiming that the jumbled text was 'exactly as easy to read' as un-jumbled text. This minor elevated difficulty is still true in the 'counter example', if slightly increased from the initial item.

      I have noted this previously [slashdot.org], but on an aged thread: it seems that a simple inversion of the internal characters of a word is the

    • > 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.

      Notice that fixing the first and last letters of the words means that all words of three are fewer letters remain unchanged, and

  • 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 coll

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • What kind of psychology are you doing? The size of study groups varies a lot depending on what you're trying to measure, and what techniques you need to use.

        In psychophysics it is commonplace to publish results drawn from just two subjects--one of whom is usually the author of the paper.
    • As a degree holder, you must know that psychology is largely an exercise of statistics, as in "lies, damn lies, and statistics". Small sample sizes are a bit hard to accept at an intuitive level, but I have seen very few published results proved wrong due to the initial sample size... there are so many other things that can be wrong or go wrong!

      Tangentially: a BA in Cognitive Science? Shouldn't that be Cognitive Art, then?

      • Tangentially: a BA in Cognitive Science? Shouldn't that be Cognitive Art, then?

        Some universities award BAs for science subjects. Oxford for instance has a tradition of awarding only BAs, so a physicist will leave with a BA in Physics, rather than a BSci. The Masters would be an MPhys, however.

    • Uh, maybe since Western written languages are radically different from ideographic languages, people read Western written language in a radically different way from ideographic languages. Perhaps research into how people read Western languages will give us insights on how people read Western languages.

      Incidentally, I think that prostate cancer research is too male-centric. I think we should study it in women too.
  • 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. s
  • 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
  • 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, >

  • 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...

  • Handwriting Too (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Avatar889 ( 670455 )
    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...

  • 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 America

  • In other words, Mr. Larson's subjects move their lips when they read.

    Were they all Microsoft programmers, by any chance?

  • Shapes of words (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Our Man In Redmond ( 63094 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @10:28AM (#7077440)
    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 . . .
    • You need to atleast explain why you think this if you want anyone to take you seriously.
    • The parent comment demonstrates the common paucity of hard knowledge about chinese orthography. A book which sets out to debunk most of the myths about chinese characters is :

      The Chinese Language :
      Fact and Fantasy
      by John DeFrancis

      John DeFrancis is emeritus professor of Chines at the University of Hawai`i.
    • " 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."

      Is this really true? I find with many of the kanji that their meaning can be deciphered based on the individual components of the shape. For example, the character for forest looks vaguely like a forest, as does mountain, and star, etc. Perhaps this is what you meant though.

  • 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 hu
    • 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

      Context would be key here, I think. Whereas it's relatively simple to see that "emaxlpe" is a mispelling (although a relatively unlikely one, given the layout of the qwerty keyboard - the computer would be wise to know about that too and factor it into its decisions), without context I dont think we could decide whether

  • 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 ?

  • 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 ;-)

  • Microsoft Invests where the Profit is (Score:5, Funny)

    by Orne ( 144925 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @11:19AM (#7077806) Homepage
    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 ...
    • Windows XP has a Speech module in the control panel that's getting pretty good at speaking random text.

      Sounds like Microsoft reads Ask Slashdot. [slashdot.org] What a great way to screw with users, getting their PC speaking random text while they try to work.

    • 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.

      Last I checked, Microsoft's Human Interface R&D department was headquartered at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino.

      Windows XP has a Speech module in the control panel that's getting pretty good at speaking random text.

      Which other operating systems have had the ability to
  • ...is to make people see a BSOD and think, "Yum, candy!"

  • 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 [scramblizer.com].
  • 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
    • I follow you, but think your idea is only valid the first time, or first few times, we attempt to decipher a word. Eventualy when we read words like deoxyribonucleic (acid) we no longer put it into our "stack" but instead fairly instantly recognize the word, especialy when it is in context. Most of our time reading is not reading from left to right but seeing an entire word and making sense of it. I don't have a counterclaim as to how this works, but I think it is fairly evident that once we become profi
  • 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
    • There aren't actually that many different models of human cognition (or other things). The reason why there are different ones is, that models are models, simplifications, they can't explain everything. At the same time, one model may explain the same thing as another, only from a different angle. And at the same time, one of them is just as valid as the other.

      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 scienc

      • There aren't actually that many different models of human cognition (or other things). The reason why there are different ones is, that models are models, simplifications, they can't explain everything. At the same time, one model may explain the same thing as another, only from a different angle. And at the same time, one of them is just as valid as the other.

        I was, of course, exaggerating. The problem is that no effort has been made or apparently will be made to develop a complete model for how percepti

  • 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 *jo
  • The guys a moron or has an agenda. Working for MS, he probably has an agenda. I have done my own research into this topic. Not only am I an artist, but I am also skilled at math. My profesional field is instrumentation. I have been studying how animal vision works for about 20 years. Art is all about abstraction. An artist creates an illusion that the audience interprets as an image. Knowing the dynamics of vision is instrumental in creating effective art. Try drawing a monsoonal anvil cloud lit by the sett
    • Where did he say that humans don't recognize words as a whole?

      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.

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