• Question: Please Read the Statement below and see how many F's you can spot: FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE- SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF- IC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS. How may did you see? If you saw 3 look very carefully and please tell me the reason why so many people at first glance only say 3. Why is this?

    Asked by forrestgump to Alex, Jools, Lynz, Matt, Rika on 15 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Julie Greensmith

      Julie Greensmith answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Its down to human perception and we think that it might be to do with something we call Information Theory developed by a dude called Claude Shannon last century. We take in information in different types of “chunks”. Our brains interpret these chunks in different ways.

      We are tuned to spot the F’s at the beginnings of words and in words which seem “important” to the meaning of the sentence. So most people with this phrase spot the F in Finished, F in Files and F in scientiFic and ignore the F’s in the little words like oF. We place less value on the “in between” words because of the way in which our attention works and is drawn towards the big words like scientific. we tend to read the first letters of each word more carefully than the last letters.

      This sentence is a common thing used when testing people with dyslexia.

    • Photo: Matthew Dickinson

      Matthew Dickinson answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      That’s great, it has been suggested that as we read we filter out none important factors so for instance letters in the centre of a word most people will simply scan the word knowing what it is. This allows us to process words faster. There is some research in to autism that suggests that some people with the condition do not have this filting method, so in a lack of better words they will see the world in full. But I am no expert at this.

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