Mgrego2, I like your post but I have to disagree.


<<<<Ever ducked a ball that you saw out of the corner of your eye? If you had to rely on your conscious mind to dodge the ball, you'd eat the ball.>>>>

Though I do believe in subconscious, this statement is not necessarily true. Our minds are attracted to the unexpected (sounds, visual, taste, etc). We also have a survival mechanism it seems. Dodging a ball in your peripheral vision might be a result of these two things.

<<<<The argument boils down to whether or not you believe the unconscious mind is capable of taking snapshots of a page of text and then using "optical character recognition" to gather and sort the information. My crappy little PC can do it. I don't think it's a stretch to think that your brain can do it. Your brain obviously has OCR type abilities or you wouldn't be reading this.>>>>


There is a few things wrong with this reasoning in regards to the article. Your eyes have more sensors going closer to the middle. That is why when we want to focus on something, we focus so that something goes to the middle of your vision so you can see it the clearest. If you seen something just on the edge of your vision (that ball you were dodging for instance). Did you see it's details or just a flash?

From the article "With George McConkie, now at the University of Illinois, Rayner measured the perceptual span of readers by replacing most of the words on a video screen with nonsense strings of letters. Wherever the eye was pointing, a small patch of screen would have the correct letters, but everywhere else they would be jumbled." And the participants did not notice!

As every seeing person knows, we have a vision area larger than this middle area, but how much detail does it give the farther from the middle

As for the analogy that computer OCR and photoreading should be possible because of brain OCR:

Computer OCR, the computer takes in letters clearly (no periph vision, all detailed) and decides what those letters are.

Photoreading we see the page a few seconds (in photo focus as book states) and never focus on any words individually. How can we focus on words afterwards if we haven't focused and seen them in clear detail during. The article seems to support the notion that you can visually see many letters (but not id them) at once of course, but can physically only clearly focus on and decipher (OCR) a few words (10-15?) a second.

[This message has been edited by chaosadelt (edited March 21, 2001).]