Eli5-How are we able to read sentences & paragraphs even if the words are upside down?
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I’m not an expert, but I’ve read something a long time ago about how our brains fill in the blanks with familiar situations. Reading upside-down, even backwards, missing letters, mixed letters, etc. It’s similar to seeing a car upside-down, right? You know what the car looks like right-side-up, so you are aware that the tires on top of the car is still a car. It’s the same with letters.
Personal opinion – Image recognition isn’t wholly dependent upon orientation. If you look at clouds and see an upside-down horse you are still seeing a horse. The same holds true but is much simpler for letters, an image among a set of 26 images (not including decimals) that represents a sound. This also holds true for backward letters. You aren’t trying to make sense of what that image looks like but which of the 26 sound images that upside-down letter is.
Not so personal opinion – Add to this that our brains are pretty good at pre-fetching knowledge so that you can read a word based upon the number of letters and the first and last letters of the word. There was an internet myth that was supposedly based upon “a Cambridge study” that you could read a word with the middle letters jumbled which led a Cambridge researcher to actually study it and found it is mostly true with some caveats. For example, shorters words are easier to predict/read and longer words become easier if you keep double letters together.
Eli5-How are we able to read sentences & paragraphs even if the words are upside down?
In: 0
I’m not an expert, but I’ve read something a long time ago about how our brains fill in the blanks with familiar situations. Reading upside-down, even backwards, missing letters, mixed letters, etc. It’s similar to seeing a car upside-down, right? You know what the car looks like right-side-up, so you are aware that the tires on top of the car is still a car. It’s the same with letters.
Personal opinion – Image recognition isn’t wholly dependent upon orientation. If you look at clouds and see an upside-down horse you are still seeing a horse. The same holds true but is much simpler for letters, an image among a set of 26 images (not including decimals) that represents a sound. This also holds true for backward letters. You aren’t trying to make sense of what that image looks like but which of the 26 sound images that upside-down letter is.
Not so personal opinion – Add to this that our brains are pretty good at pre-fetching knowledge so that you can read a word based upon the number of letters and the first and last letters of the word. There was an internet myth that was supposedly based upon “a Cambridge study” that you could read a word with the middle letters jumbled which led a Cambridge researcher to actually study it and found it is mostly true with some caveats. For example, shorters words are easier to predict/read and longer words become easier if you keep double letters together.
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