I was thinking of a psychology test I saw once. It has a yellow, triangular road sign with the words:


Caution: the
the road is wet.

(or something of the sort) with the sentence broken so the first "the" ended the first half and the second "the" began the second half of the sentence.

A phrase was used for the fact that most people, when shown this particular sign, will fail to notice that "the" occurs twice. It had a little do with a cognitive bias based on the presupposition that "road signs never contain grammatical errors".

But the chapter went on to describe the tendency for people who are reading in their native language to know or predict what word (especially correlative) is coming based on those preceding. We don't read word-by-word but make constant computational short-cuts by extrapolation.

If I remember this correctly, it was some kind of "correct usage conditioning" which creates a bias toward the correct interpretation (the reason even experienced editors can occasionally "overlook" a textual mistake) and is loosely tied in with the "Stroop effect"; that is, the reason it is difficult to quickly read off the COLOUR of these words.

Green
Red
Yellow
Blue

"(Something) inhibition", perhaps.

The old, ratty psychology book in question was opened at random in a doctor's waiting room about a year ago. The term might be out of date anyway. Maybe I dreamt it.

But oh this blasted loganamnosis! Make it stop! Make it stop!

Last edited by Hydra; 10/04/06 01:17 PM.