Deciphering CAPTCHAs: What a Turing Test Reveals about Human Cognition

Turning Turing's logic on its head, we used widespread letter-based Turing Tests found on the internet (CAPTCHAs) to shed light on human cognition. We examined the basis of the human ability to solve CAPTCHAs, where machines fail. We asked whether this is due to our use of slow-acting inferential processes that would not be available to machines, or whether fast-acting automatic orthographic processing in humans has superior robustness to shape variations. A masked priming lexical decision experiment revealed efficient processing of CAPTCHA words in conditions that rule out the use of slow inferential processing. This shows that the human superiority in solving CAPTCHAs builds on a high degree of invariance to location and continuous transforms, which is achieved during the very early stages of visual word recognition in skilled readers

Understanding the Cognitive Impact of Emerging Web Technologies: A Research Focus Area for Embodied, Extended and Distributed Approaches to Cognition

Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is also a need to explore the effects of the Web on our cognitive profile. This is particularly so as the range of interactive opportunities we have with the Web expands under the influence of a range of emerging technologies. Embodied, extended and distributed approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the potential cognitive impact of these new technologies because of the emphasis they place on extra-neural and extra-corporeal factors in the shaping of our cognitive capabilities at both an individual and collective level. The current paper outlines a number of areas where embodied, extended and distributed approaches to cognition are useful in understanding the impact of emerging Web technologies on future forms of both human and machine intelligence

SECURITY AND USER EXPERIENCE: A HOLISTIC MODEL FOR CAPTCHA USABILITY ISSUES

CAPTCHA is a widely adopted security measure in the Web, and is designed to effectively distinguish humans and bots by exploiting human’s ability to recognize patterns that an automated bot is incapable of. To counter this, bots are being designed to recognize patterns in CAPTCHAs. As a result, CAPTCHAs are now being designed to maximize the difficulty for bots to pass human interaction proof tests, while making it quite an arduous task even for humans as well. The approachability of CAPTCHA is increasingly being questioned because of the inconvenience it causes to legitimate users. Irrespective of the popularity, CAPTCHA is indispensable if one wants to avoid potential security threats. We investigated the usability issues associated with CAPTCHA. We built a holistic model by identifying the important concepts associated with CAPTCHAs and its usability. This model can be used as a guide for the design and evaluation of CAPTCHAs