Mgrego,

I was busy, but thanks for reminding me. With this post I was only coming up with ways to test the eyes to see if PRing is physically possible by isolating the system and not relying on the brain (taking out factors). I am happy to say that I devised a different thourough way to easily test photoreading without needing any of the advanced technology.

As for your argument:
<<<<<I can clearly see Chinese characters but they mean absolutely nothing to me. They can be as in focus and lovely as you like and they're still going to bounce off the back of my head with a meaningless thump.>>>>>

Though I don't see the point of this part of the argument let me comment on it. That is because you never learned it and associated anything meaniful to the character symbol, the following list has words whose letters you recognize but I'm willing to bet for you it is meaningless on at least one line. Probaly would be as meaningless at any chinese characters because you don't know the language or skill it is associated with:
étranger
kopfbedeckungen
bequem
escuela
padre
main{ static int i = 0; auto int j = 8h; for (;i<8;i++)--j; }/* /* *\ Author:kljdsfj*/

<<<<<I can take a very bad fax and do a pretty nice job of deciphering it, based on partial words, partial letters, etc. My OCR software couldn't come close. Just by determining what I'm seeing, you would not be able to judge how capably I would process
that information. Even if my peripheral vision does a mediocre job of capturing
the image, it's still quite possible that whatever part of me does the analysis
would be able to come up with the goods.>>>>>

First of all, a computer program is basically just a set of rules (written by the programmers) for the computer to follow. OCR might be programmed in the future to handle bad faxes etc. but right now they are written with clear letters in mind (more or less). I am lucky if my current OCR can even read the font I use which any human can read! But it is not comparable yet to the human mind.

When you reading a bad fax you still see a certain pattern (I assume if you can decipher it) and you can basically rule out certain letters on the bad part you are trying to decipher. Maybe seeing the pattern is enough to know the missing/bad letter. If not, then your mind can take in account the context, which letter would make most sense in that word, which word would make most sense in that sentence. You also might take in account the subject being written about for the clues. I would also bet that you would look directly at the bad parts of the fax to decipher it, not with your peripheral vision.


On your account with us being able to PR by filling in the gaps like reading a bad fax, I still cannot totally reconcile those two examples. What if outside our center of vision, there is truly not enough detail on letters so our mind can make it out. It would not take to much loss of detail to render one letter unreadable - letters look similar to a point.

And with PRing one page a second with no focus (or just center focus, still with 90% of letters outside center focus) where is my context to decipher all those letters - I cannot take the word it is in to decipher it since I didn't really make out the word, I cannot take the sentence the word is in since I really didn't make out the sentence.

<<<<Just by determining what I'm seeing, you would not be able to judge how capably I would process that information.>>>>>
Maybe not, but the purpose of the first few tests was to see the capabilities of the eye, not the brain.

Anyway like I said earlier, I think I came up with a way to test PRing scientifically but without all this advanced technology stuff and academic discussion of the brain.