The researchers then tested the responses of the artificial neurons to four, five and six-letter words, studying how difficult or easy it was for these neurons to distinguish actual words from jumbled words. Right: An example of finding the odd two-letter combination (bigram) from a group of distractors (Image: Adapted from Agrawal et al, eLife, 2020) Left: An example of finding the odd letter from a group of distractors. Using these artificial neurons, the team then predicted how much time human subjects would take to identify odd two-letter combinations hidden within an array of two-letter distractors and found that the predictions matched the experimental findings. Using this information, the team proceeded to design computational units (artificial neurons) that were mathematically tuned to gauge how similar or different letters were to each other, thereby mimicking the neurons in the brain. The team could thus calculate an index of how similar or different English letters were to each other, based on the time taken by the subjects to spot the odd letter in this experiment.
The researchers found that the more similar were the shapes of the odd letter and the distractors, the more time the subjects took to accurately spot it. The team asked fluent English speakers aged 22 – 27 years to search for the odd letter out within a group of letters (distractors) displayed on the screen. “We show that our ability to read jumbled words comes from simple rules in the visual system, whereby the response to a string of letters is a weighted sum of its individual letters,” Aakash Agarwal, first author of the paper, says. However, how these factors contribute individually or collectively to recognize words remains unclear. At the phonological level, it is easier to recognize similar sounding words, e.g. “7EX7_WI7H_NUM83R5.”Īt a linguistic level, it is easier to recognize words that we encounter more frequently or have frequently-used letters. For instance, ‘UNIEVRSITY’ is easier to read than ‘UTISERVNIY.’ We can also read words when numbers of similar shape replace letters, e.g.
Yet, some arrangements are easier to read than others. Earlier research has shown that our brain processes jumbled words at various levels - visual, phonological and linguistic.Īt the visual level, it is easy to read a jumbled word correctly when the first and the last letters are retained and the other letters are jumbled or replaced with letters of similar shapes. Reading words is a complex process in which our brain decodes the letters and symbols in the word (also called the orthographic code) to derive meaning.
According to this model, when we see a string of letters, our brain uses the letter shapes to form an image of the word and compares it with the closest visually similar word stored in our brain. How does our brain read jumbled words correctly? Scientists led by SP Arun and K V S Hari from the Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, have developed a computational model that sheds light on this.
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