How the brain understands jumble of words and letters

Reading:The fine detail of what happens between eye and brain when we read can be revealed following research by a team at the University of Southhampton.

Our eyes share the reading task, picking out different parts of a single word before relaying them to the brain where they are fused back into a single word.

It turns out that our eyes are usually about two letters apart as they scan across a line of text, cognitive psychologist Prof Simon Liversedge said at the London launch of the 2007 BA festival of science. The reading process was far more complex than imagined, he said. Our eyes don't scan smoothly across the page, sending back a single unified image of the words.

Rather, our eyes make jerky movements, each relaying a separate fragment of a word back to the brain where they are "fused", Prof Liversedge said.

His team used sophisticated eye tracking equipment to determine which letter of a word a person was looking at every thousandth of a second. It identified the two letter separation between what each eye was picking up.

"Although this difference might sound small, in fact it represents a very substantial difference in terms of the precise "picture" of the word that each eye delivers to the brain," he said.

His team used a battery of tests to confirm that each eye sent different images for later reconstruction into a single word in the brain. "We were able to clearly show that we experience a single, very clear and crisp visual representation due to fusion of the two different images from each eye," he stated.

Recognising this process is important for understanding how our brains process read information, he added. Knowing how it works "is vital if we are to develop better methods of teaching children to read and offer remedial treatments for those with reading disorders such as dyslexia", he said.

His team is now attempting to gauge the range of visual disparities over which readers can successfully fuse words.