Can Some People Not Read Upside Down
Reader, be proud. You're a perceptual expert.
As yous read, your eyes alternately focus and move forth each line of text in a seamless sequence honed over years of practise. Reading, recognizing faces and distinguishing colors or musical tones are all forms of perceptual expertise.
To appreciate the visual skill involved in reading, plow a text upside down. You'll stumble along in fits and starts, your eyes pausing longer and more often, each motion bringing less information to your encephalon.
To assess how such neuro-ocular blundering might be improved, researchers at the Academy of British Columbia asked 7 volunteers to practice reading novels upside down. Afterwards xxx half-hour sessions over a period of x weeks, they gained an average of 35 words per minute in reading speed on inverted text.
This could exist promising news for people with right hemianopia (hemi-uh-NOH-pee-uh), a condition that erases role of the right field of vision in both optics. Whatsoever damage to the left occipital lobe of the encephalon, or the pathways connecting information technology to the eyes, tin can cause this disorder. Hemianopia, from the Greek for "half sight," most often results from a stroke, but can also befall patients with multiple sclerosis, brain tumors or traumatic injuries.
When we read, we see only three or 4 letters to the left of our eyes' fixation betoken, merely we pick up information 10 to 15 letters to the correct. So in a gild that reads from left to right, left hemianopia has fiddling effect on reading ability, but right hemianopia can be devastating. Brain injury patients rank the inability to read among the most significant furnishings on their quality of life.
Since inverted text is read from right to left, those who accept lost vision to the right can gain more information with each fixation. Other therapeutic approaches involve practicing longer rightward eye movements, simply reading upside down is more of a strategic arroyo, says neuro-ophthalmologist Jason Barton, senior writer of the study. "I tin can't change the fact that y'all've got this blind area," Barton says, "but how can I assist yous live with it? How can I help y'all circumvent it?"
Barton and his team set out to test whether healthy people could learn to read inverted text as efficiently as upright text, and how long information technology might take. Before and after training, they measured subjects' reading speed in both orientations when reading silently or aloud.
Subjects adept at home by reading novels online upside downwards. The novels, rated at an 8th-class level or lower, included Alice in Wonderland and The Count of Monte Cristo. Every five pages, participants answered multiple-selection questions nearly the text to reinforce comprehension. They gained an average of 1.2 words per minute each session, for a total improvement of 35 words per minute.
To reveal which changes in ocular movement contributed to this progress, the researchers used a video eye-tracker to record the position of the left centre 1,000 times per 2nd while subjects read aloud, both earlier and subsequently the 10 weeks of preparation. In the case shown here, each circumvolve represents a single fixation of the eye on the text, its diameter proportional to the duration of fixation. The contrast between the inverted text before and afterwards training shows that the number and length of fixations decreased, making reading more efficient.
The subjects besides made fewer eye movements, with a lower proportion of backwards movements, suggesting they picked upwards data from text more than economically after training. Overall, the x weeks of practice closed about 30 percent of the gap in reading ability betwixt upright and inverted text. The team reported their findings on Dec. 27 in Experimental Brain Inquiry.
Barton is encouraged by the outcomes of the grooming, only cautions that 3 or four times more preparation may not atomic number 82 to 100 percent progress. "Given all the years of practice you lot take with upright, it's probably unrealistic for us to promise you after forty weeks of reading three times a week upside downwardly that you'll be just as skilful," he says. "I suspect information technology will take more practice."
Even if people with hemianopia can become proficient at reading upside downward, they may exist too embarrassed to do so in public. "You have to deal with stares of people looking at you as you're reading upside downward," Barton says. Neurologist Alex Leff at Academy Higher London voices similar concerns; he says his patients are not interested in reading upside down. In addition to the stares, he points out, "A lot of the text nosotros read in the environment cannot be manipulated in this style."
Leff advocates practice with reading laterally scrolling text, which tin increment the ability to make rightward eye movements. Barton believes that, in addition to preparation with inverted text, patients can learn to enlarge their perceptual span to the left, from but three or four messages to six or seven. He'south first to test the potential of this method to increase reading speed.
"Later on all, perceptual span is non something that's hard-wired," Barton says. "Yous develop that through the course of living in a language that reads from left to correct. These things are malleable." The study is the first to demonstrate this malleability in adult readers. Previous analyses of children'south power to read upside downward confounded perceptual expertise with language acquisition.
Oddly, texts written in stone are a testament to the flexibility of reading direction. Many ancient Greek inscriptions apply a method of writing chosen boustrophedon, or "ox-turning," in which every other line of text is inverted. The author'south manus–and the reader's centre–mimics the back-and-along trajectory of an ox plowing a field. So ancient wisdom could testify the plasticity of our modernistic perceptual abilities.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Source: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/to-patch-a-visual-gap-turn-that-text-around/
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