Reading
When identifying letters while reading, not only are their shapes picked up but also other features like their colors and surrounding elements. Individual letters are processed serially when spatially conjoined with another letter. The locations of each feature of a letter are not known in advance, even while the letter is in front of the reader. Since the location of the letter's features and/or the location of the letter is unknown, feature interchanges can occur if one is not attentively focused. This is known as lateral masking, which in this case, refers to a difficulty in separating a letter from the background.
Read more about this topic: Feature Integration Theory
Famous quotes containing the word reading:
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
—Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)
“Among the earliest institutions to be invented, if I read the stars right, is a Protestant monastery, a place of elegant seclusion where melancholy gentlemen and ladies may go to spend the advanced session of life in drinking milk, walking the woods & reading the Bible and the poets.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Chaucer sawed life in half and out tumbled hundreds of unpremeditated lives, because he didn’t have the cast-iron grid of a priori coherence that makes reading Goethe, Shakespeare, or Dante an exercise in searching for signs of life among the conventions, compulsions, self-justifications, proofs, wise saws, simple but powerful messages, and poetry.”
—Marvin Mudrick (1921–1986)