Almost Nobody Can Write This Letter of the Alphabet Correctly

The alphabet is a little like a baseball team. You’ve got your everyday players—your A’s and E’s and S’s. Then you’ve got your benchwarmers—your X’s and Q’s and Z’s. They’ve got character, but you’re not going to go a whole nine innings with them. If we don’t use all 26 letters the same amount, we at least recognize them equally, right? Not so much. A new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance reveals that there’s one letter we think we know well, but we don’t: The lower case “g.” We can recognize it—usually—we can read it, but for the life of us, we can’t draw it. That curious truth holds clues to how the brain learns and why, sometimes, it fails to learn. The lower-case g actually comes in two typographic forms: The fish hook, a circle with a left facing curl beneath it, and the loop-tail, two closed, connected circles with a sort of rightward-facing tassel on the top one. While the loop-tail is everywhere, however, it’s the rare person who can reproduce it on demand. To investigate this phenomenon, a group of researchers in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University first conducted a survey to determine exactly how common the loop-tail is. Selecting 100 books in each of three categories—adult fiction and nonfiction, children’s picture books and children’s chapter boo...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized learning onetime psychology reading the brain the mind writing Source Type: news