The tiktok style subtitles is a word by word subtitle while a normal subtitle is usually the whole sentence or partial sentence in a video.
I am trying to understand the weird feeling when i watch those subtitle video styles.
In: Biology
When you read, you actually digest ideas in chunks and not word by word. Your brain pretty much knows what to expect in a sentence, given syntax and grammar rules. In fact, when reading, many words in a sentence are assumed to be there and totally glossed over. For example, consider the commonly shared repeat-word “illusions” (for lack of a better word) you see online, like “do you read the second the the in this sentence?” With appropriate spacing and carriage return placement, you’re likely to skip over a “the” entirely. Incidentally, this is also a common way to speed read – instead of reading a word at a time, take in four or five words at once.
By contrast, when subtitles are presented a single word at a time your brain does not know what to expect next and is further taxed by being unable to assign importance to each word. In the sentence “subtitles should be presented line by line” the importance of words like ‘by’ and ‘be’ are minimized, where ‘presented’ and ‘subtitles’ are highlighted. By contrast when presented this way:
Subtitles
Should
Be
Presented
Line
By
Line
Not only fails to make clear which items are important (in a list, the brain has been conditioned to treat all items with equal importance), but also denies your ability to re-read in cases of confusion. To make matters worse, the generally accepted number of items you can hold in working memory are 5 +/-2. So you experience further cognitive load having to remember each individual item until it can be chunked into a meaningful message.
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