cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/6822168
I was watching a twitch streamer play the game pogostuck (A game similar in frustration and difficulty to Getting over it with Bennett Foddy — Don’t Fall!).
They were also reading chat at the same time (usually out loud, as well). Multitasking.
Lots of sources (here’s one) say that true multitasking is impossible. Rather, it’s very fast switching, where there is a degradation of performance.
Knowing this, I naturally made it my mission to trip the streamer up with seemingly benign messages.
I was sharing some actual information about another streamer who beat another game, but a made a typo something like:
I remember a streamer beat the game a game …
And I noticed how much more the streamer struggled to read this compared to previous, accidental typos (missing spaces, extra spaces, etc.). He spent a good 5 seconds on this message, and during the process, he fell really far. 😈
So I decided to do some testing. Inserting words, swapping them around, and whatnot, to see what tripped him up the most. Most typos didn’t affect him.
There was one typo that tripped him again, where I said something like:
If it wasn’t for a for
So it seems to be repetition? But I couldn’t always replicate this with other forms of repetition.
Later on, I copied the two guards riddle, with an alteration:
One of the guards always lies and the other always lies as wekk. You don’t know which one is the truth-teller or the liar either. However both guards know each other
Sadly, I didn’t cut the part about “don’t know which is truth teller or liar” out.
The streamer spent a good 5 minutes interpreting this puzzle, and eventually interpreting it as the original puzzle. Then, he was trying to solve a riddle, game, and read chat all at once.
He was stuck on the bottom until he gave up on the riddle (I revealed that I meant what I said when I said both guards lie). 😈
Anyway, that was a bit off topic but still relevant.
I’m wondering if any studies have been done on this? I know studies have been done on human’s ability to read words with the letters partially scrambled, but what about typos?
How can I improve my distraction game (with plausible deniability of course)?
While reading text your brain will bulk recognise what it interprets as common phrases and sentence fragments to build an internal lexical model to then interpret. After a while as you get more proficient at reading this becomes a mostly subconscious operation, which then hands concepts from what it’s read to your front of mind to further deal with.
If you blend contradictory common phrases together your brain will bounce through the phrase/fragment recognition part fine. Then it will trip over the lexical parsing of them, suddenly requiring a lot more mental horsepower to figure out what’s going on. Basically your front of mind task will be interrupted by your subconscious task basically going “what the hell is this!? I can’t make sense of this, you have a look” as it dumps a jumble of words on you.
For example, has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like? That phrase broke the internet about 10 years ago and it’s a pretty good example.
Somewhat tangential, but I’m reminded of that “viral” email that made the rounds back in the day.
An e-mail that circulated around the internet about 7 years ago claimed that this is true by stating “Aoccdrnig to rseaerch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.” It turns out that many of the claims that are made in this e-mail are false; readers do display reading difficulties when reading jumbled text (Rayner et al., 2006, White et al., 2008) and no such research has been conducted at Cambridge University. However, the assumption that the exterior letters are more important than interior letters in lexical processing does seem to hold up in a laboratory setting.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0001691812001564
