We use letters every day, and apparently there is one lowercase letter that we don’t recognize.
Psychologists at Johns Hopkins University have discovered that most people don’t realize there are two lowercase gs.
One of them is the ‘g’ for open tails, and most of us would have handwritten an image that would be comparable to a ‘ring with a hook hanging’.
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Then there is the loop tail ‘g’ that appears in printed materials such as books and newspapers, and in serif fonts such as Times New Roman and Calibri. We’ve all seen this type of letter millions of times and seem to remember it. It’s a completely different challenge.
Thirty-eight volunteers participated in the study published by. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance They were then asked to list characters that appeared to have two variations in printing.
In the first experiment, “most participants could not recall the presence of the looptail g.”” Only two people could do itWrite the loop tail g exactly.
“Even if they can read it, they don’t fully know what this letter is about,” says co-author Gari Ellenbloom. Said.
The next participant was asked to find examples of looptail gs in the text and then to reproduce this letter style. She was the only one who was ultimately able to do this, and half of the group wrote an open tail g.
Multiple-choice questions posed to participantsYouTube/John Hopkins University
Finally, people who participated in this study were asked to identify the letter g on a multiple-choice test in which they chose the letter g from four choices, and 7 out of 25 people were able to do so correctly.
So why does it recognize characters but not characters?
According to Michael McCloskey, senior author of the paper, it may have something to do with the fact that we are not taught to write this kind of “g”.
“What we suspect is happening here is that we learn most of the letter shapes because we have to write them in school. ‘Looptail g’ is “Well,” he said, because he wasn’t taught how to write.
“More generally, our findings raise questions about the conditions under which mass exposures lead to detailed, accurate, and accessible knowledge and those under which they do not.”
In a play-along video on John Hopkin’s YouTube channel, four different g’s, labeled 1 through 4, are displayed on screen, prompting the viewer to guess which one is the correct looptail ‘g’. I am asking for
(*spoiler alert*)
The correct answer is number 3.
On the other hand, the research also led to research questioning the impact of writing less and using more devices on our reading comprehension.
“What about kids just starting to learn to read? Do they have a little more trouble with this form of g because they aren’t forced to pay attention to it?” McCloskey said. .
“That’s something we don’t really know either. Our findings provide an interesting way of answering questions about the importance of writing to reading…”
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