Anomalous figures and the tendency to continuation

September 15, 2003 - Posted by André Restivo- 0 Comments

I found this article while browsing comments on Joi Ito’s article about Letter Ordering. The article talks about a interesting trick our minds plays on us when we are looking at images and expect some kind of continuation to occur and it doesn’t.

Minguzzi G. F. (1986). Anomalous figures and the tendency to continuation. This happens when it is “evident” in some way that the region which may be thought of as performing the function of covering the underlying continuation of inducing figure has the quality of a solid surface

For instance check how the left image makes you think there is a circle between the thicker lines while the right image doesn’t:

I specially like this one. You can clearly imagine the triangle on this one (you can’t even imagine it without the triangle) although there is just a few information to support its existence:



Letter order doens’t matter

September 15, 2003 - Posted by André Restivo- 1 Comment

Wow, it’s actually easy to read this next paragraph:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Update: Some more stuff:
Perl code to scramble your text :-)

perl -pe ’s{(?<=Ww)(ww+)(?=wW)}{ my $s; $s= rand(100) > 50 ? qq|$s$_| : qq|$_$s| for (split //, $1); $s; }eg;’ < inputfile > outputfile

And some nice links: ABC News, Uncle Jazzbeau’s and Language Chat