Incorporation of prior knowledge and habits while solving anagrams

Games and puzzles provide a valuable context for examining human problem- solving behavior. We recorded and analyzed the sequence of letters viewed by the participants of our study while they were solving anagram puzzles. The goal was to examine and understand how people's linguistic habits and prior knowledge influenced their eye movements. The main findings of this study are: (1) People's stereotypical habit of scanning (e.g., adjacent or top viewing) strongly influences their solution-seeking behavior. (2) People tend to incorpo- rate their prior knowledge of letter statistics in a reasonable way, such as looking less frequently at letter combinations that are uncommon in the English lan- guage. Therefore, it was found that people’s prior

Information distribution within musical segments

In the research on word recognition, it has been shown that word beginnings have higher information content for word identification than word endings; this asymmetric information distribution within words has been argued to be due to the communicative pressure to allow words in speech to be recognized as early as possible. Through entropy analysis using two representative datasets from Wikifonia and the Essen folksong corpus respectively, here we show that musical segments also have higher information content (i.e., higher entropy) in segment beginnings than endings. Nevertheless, this asymmetry was not as dramatic as that found within words, and the highest information content was observed in the middle of the segments (i.e., an inverted-U pattern). This effect may be because the first and last notes of a musical segment tend to be tonally stable, with more flexibility in the first note for providing the initial context. The asymmetric information distribution within words has been shown to be an important factor accounting for various asymmetric effects in word reading, such as the left-biased preferred viewing location and optimal viewing position effects. Similarly, the asymmetric information distribution within musical segments is a potential factor that can modulate music reading behavior and should not be overlooked.published_or_final_versio

Communication via the kinesthetic and tactile senses

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, 1961.Vita.Includes bibliographical references.by James Charles Bliss.Ph.D