Identifying a lower-case ‘g’ is far harder than you might think

So you think you know the alphabet, eh. Well, think again.

Cognitive scientists at John Hopkins University noticed that people find it very difficult to identify a lowercase “g”, despite seeing it every day.

Michael McCloskey, the senior author of the study, said that we often think that if we just look at something enough, we know its shape, but their results suggest that isn’t the case.

“What we think may be happening here is that we learn the shapes of most letters in part because we have to write them in school. Looptail g is something we’re never taught to write, so we may not learn its shape as well,” he said. Read more…

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