Is this a strong-mind test or a weak-mind test? One might assume
that a stronger mind would "see the world as it really is" or something like
that. One might similarly assume that a weak mind would be "fooled" by
something like this. The message claims that it is an impressive human
achievement to be able to see a 5 as an S and a 1 as an I. I'm not convinced.
My guess is that if I trained a rat to press one lever when it saw an
S, and another lever when it saw an E you would not think that was very
impressive. What if I then showed the rat a five, and it pressed the S lever,
and I showed the rat a three and it pressed the E lever? My guess is that you
would
still not find this very
impressive, that it would not be evidence that that rat has an amazingly
"strong" mind. I'm also pretty confident that I could get gold fish to show the
same effect.
Eric
P.S. Eleanor Gibson, wife of James J. Gibson,
the perceptual psychologist who has come up in a few conversations, was one of
the most prominent developmental psychologists of the past decade, and won the
National Medal of Science. Though she is best known to the public for the
"visual cliff" experiments that often get a nod in intro psych textbooks, for
more than a decade she studied reading. One of the major finding was that
skilled readers use form perception to read, with minor sensitivity to the
initial and final letters - that is, in the course of normal reading, skilled
readers do
not identifying all the
letters in the word, they don't have to. The reason that the image below seems
mysterious is that we have been told over and over again by our teachers that
that reading is about identifying individual letters and "mentally" forming
them into words.... but it just ain't true.
On Sat, Nov 5,
2011 01:14 AM,
Rich Murray <[hidden email]>
wrote:
<a class="uiPhotoThumb largePhoto"
href="http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=197737476969569&set=a.192770960799554.47373.192591077484209&type=1&ref=nf" rel="" title="" target="" style="cursor: pointer; color: rgb(59, 89, 152); border-top-width: 1px; border-right-width: 1px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; border-right-style: solid; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(59, 89, 152); border-right-color: rgb(59, 89, 152); border-bottom-color: rgb(59, 89, 152); border-left-color: rgb(59, 89, 152); display: inline-block; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 12px; text-align: left; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); " onclick="window.open('http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=197737476969569&set=a.192770960799554.47373.192591077484209&type=1&ref=nf');return false;"><img class="img" src="http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/s320x320/296!
037_197737476969569_192591077484209_439374_1405349450_n.jpg" alt="" style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; display: block; margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 3px; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 3px; max-width: 266px; height: auto; " height="190px" width="300px">
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