This app lets you explore the illusory perception of letters within words.
when there is sufficient information for readers to identify a word despite missing or masked letters, observers often
“fill in” the missing letters while seeing the word (Jordan, Thomas, & Scott-Brown, 1990; Lupyan, 2015). Amazingly, people often report seeing the same pattern (such as diagonal lines) as
different letters even within the same word. This indicates a strong top-down effect from perceiving words to perceiving letters. It is intuitive to think that people
perceive words by integrating evidence from individually perceived letters, but this effect shows that perception works in the other direction, too, from words to the letters they contain.
- Presets + custom phrase: 7 fixed patterns are shown along with a customizable phrase (use
* to mask a letter).
- Mask styles: Diagonal lines, cross-hatch, binary white noise, Perlin-like noise, dot, or a custom image you drop in.
- Controls: Adjust the font family/size, the method for degrading the words (blur/noise/contrast), and the line numerosity and angle for the masks made up of lines. You can combine multiple degradings.
Things to try:
- Try slowly decreasing the size of the font. At some point, when you can barely read the word, how do the masked letters appear? Can you make out details of the missing letters?
- Imagine that f**t is the word "feet". Do the middle two letters look different compared to when you imagine that the word is "foot"?
- Use a custom mask that is a photo of your face or pet. Does your mind interpret even these non-letterlike objects as letters when the word is degraded by making it small, noisy, blurry, or dim?
- What words/phrases and combinations of degradation make it most likely for you to perceive letters that are not actually present?
References
- Jordan, T. R., Thomas, S. M., & Scott-Brown, K. C. (1999). The illusory-letters phenomenon: an illustration of graphemic restoration in visual word recognition. Perception, 28(11), 1413–1416.
- Lupyan, G. (2015). Cognitive Penetrability of Perception in the Age of Prediction: Predictive Systems are Penetrable Systems. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 6, 547–569.