By the time you learn to browse the web pages and find my article, your brain
will be matured enough to read these as IBM and SAMSUNG respectively, so the question would obviously seem to be silly. When
I tried to experiment this with a small child who had just learnt what characters are, the answer was quite different and
interesting. There was an add in the newspaper on Samsung cameras and I showed the child the logo of Samsung and asked
it to read the individual characters. At that time it had only learnt to read the individual characters and not words. It
started off by saying 'S', 'reversed V', 'M', 'S', 'U', 'N' and 'G'. Amazed by this kind of a response, I stressed on the
second letter and asked it to recognize it once again, and it said 'reversed V' once again! And pat came the next question
from his side, why is it that only V is reversed while all the other characters are upright? Now what do I say for this, one
of the questions that I wanted to ask had already been shot by him. I started asking him if it could be character
'A' instead of a 'reversed V' and he said, an 'A' should have a horizontal line which was missing in this case and so it had
to be a 'V'.
There are two important points to be observed here.
- The way children learn to recognize similar patterns based on the differences present between them.
- As to how they manipulate the pattern to suit a pattern in their database for recognition.
These things are not taught to them in school, but still their brain extracts
these minute information without we noticing it.
According to 1., the difference between 'A' and 'V' is the presence of
a line in 'A' that joins the two lines similar to that in 'V'. Here the orientation doesn't play a role. But why? We
people who are matured enough to read Samsung, make a lot of assumptions during our recognition process. We recognize the
word as Samsung and then interpret the 'A' as not having the connecting line. So this is almost the reverse of what is done
during the learning stage. We don't bother because we know that it is Samsung and nothing else. The rest of the characters
along with this 'A' cannot form anything else other than Samsung in what we know. So till a child learns to read words, it
will keep interpreting this 'A' as a 'reversed V'.
According to 2., when this particular pattern doesn't match any of the letters
that it has learnt, the brain tries to manipulate it so that it closely resembles some pattern in its letters database. The
first thing is to look out for a change in orientation, and so it comes up with a 'reveresed V', than a non connected 'A'.
It basically depends on how closely it will be able match the pattern that it is seeing with the one in it's database
and bring out a meaning to it. For a child the meaning is in what character it is going to form, and the contenders are 'A'
and 'V'. With a change in orientation it will be able to form a 'V' exactly and so this becomes a 'reversed V'. It will not
go to add anything or solve for occlusion till there is a demand to it, which is the validity of the word that is going to
be formed. This child does not know what a word is. For us, the meaning is in what word it is going to form and not what letter.
Since interpreting it as 'A' would form Samsung that we have heard of and not Svmsung that has no context in our brain,
we assume that it is 'A'.
Our brain which starts its learning with more of exactness slowly gets fuzzy
as it matures. A lot of times you will never need vovels to read a word exactly. For example can you guess what this "Grmny"
word reads? If you don't get it at the frst go, let me give you a clue. It is a name of a country.
And there you go, it is indeed "Germany"! This kind of an auto complete feature
plays a role in our reading of sentences, wherein we tend to skip a lot of characters but still read the passage correctly.
Ths is an amzng prprty of our brain! The confusion arises when two words have the same non voveled lttr cqence.
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