reading research or brain research?

On 8/27/05, Carol wrote:


ALZHEIMER'S EYE TEST


Count every "F" in the following text:





FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI
FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS...
(SEE BELOW)






HOW MANY ?




3?


WRONG, THERE ARE 6 -- no joke.
READ IT AGAIN !


The reasoning behind is further down.




The brain cannot process "OF".

Incredible or what? Go back and look again!!



Anyone who counts all 6 "F's" on the first go is a genius.
Three is normal, four is quite rare.





.......
Okay, I have seen something like this in my teaching reading classes, and i don't know about the whole "brain can't process the word OF" idea. I'm curious about what Milan, my brother-in-law psychologist thinks. I think it is more of a reading issue - we read over such small words because we know they are there and we don't even pay attention to them. I would also say that as we read we tend to pay more attention to the first letters of words, and this would account for skipping of the F in OF. And why did that test feel the need to split up the word 'scientific'? Was that just so we would be sure to see that F and therefore be 'proving' their point? Because if they had kept the word together, some people probably wouldn't have noticied it first-hand, and then we would see that this is indeed, a reading issue. However, I'm still open to hearing what the brain-ologists of the crowd have to say.