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 <[email protected]> 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;"></a> ============================================================ >FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
