Barkha Rana

Special Topics: From Illusions to InferenceHomework 12

Paper: Choice #1Detection of Fs in a single statement: The role of phonetic recoding

Sometimes our eyes skip over letters we read, resulting in a detection failure. This is the
topic of the 1983 paper on the proposed role of phonetic recoding, where the researchers attempt
to understand the basis of why we tend to skip over the f in the word of but not in other
words such as if. They tested a total of five hypotheses that were split into two categories
one where detection failures of the f in of occurred due to the fact that of is a short word
and the other that acknowledges that the f in of is pronounced differently than most other
words with an f.
Within the first category, they tested for redundancy and unitization. The redundancy
hypothesis stated that we skip over the f because its predictable in a sentence and the reader
has learned over the years to not focus on it. The unitization hypothesis states that we look
beyond the letters and look for larger meaning and of is too small of a word for us to consider
without being told to pay attention to it. They tested for these by asking whether detection
failures would decrease with an increase in attention. There were four groups that were each told
to read a statement and count the number of fs read. For the second trial, a control group, and
three others that were either instructed to memorize the statement, copy the statement with their
dominant hand, or copy the statement with their non-dominant hand. Lastly, they repeated the
first trial, where they counted the number of fs in the sentence. This exercise was meant to
increase ones attentiveness to the statement. The second experiment was performed to look at
detection failures while attending specifically to of. Here, they were to detect os and fs
over several trials and also whether or no capitalization made a difference in detection. They
found that the subjects that counted os performed more accurately than those who counted
both os and fs, who performed better than those that counted fs and also that
capitalization was insignificant. The tested the redundancy and utilization hypotheses again in
the third experiment. They had subjects circle the fs and saw a decrease in errors. They also
changed the context of the sentence and found that the detection of the letter was dependent on
other words with f in the sentence. From these three experiments, they concluded that
utilization should be ruled out and redundancy was not the sole contributor in the illusion.
The second set of hypotheses were about phonetic recoding, where they wanted to see
whether the detection error was due to the pronunciation of the f. They used another high
frequency word like if and also removed the spacing between words to give of less of the
characteristic v sound. Subjects were given a booklet and were told to circle the fs and the
sentences were presented in different formats (spaced, unspaced, etc). They found spacing to
play a role for f detection in of but not if. In the final experiment, they tested redundancy
to a greater level. Subjects were given booklets, one word to a line, and were instructed to circle
the fs. They found that although redundancy plays a role, it is less than that of phonetic
coding.
In summary, the researchers set out to analyze the phenomenon of detection failure. They
studied several hypotheses and found that phonetic coding played the largest role. This was
because the f in of has a distinct sound to it compared to other words with f. Regarding
strong points, I appreciated that the researchers took their time and tested all possible causes for
the detection error, and not just once but through several experiments. For future directions, the
researcher can look at other words that contain letters phonetically similar to v and see if they
observe the same effect. They looked at capital and lower case letters and found no significance
but maybe they can try different fonts or languages. Maybe our minds do a calculation of prior
and likelihood, which leads to an inference. It might be interesting to see how this probability
varies with different conditions.