Here's another little test:

Count the number of times the letter F appears in the following sentence:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS

OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE

EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.






(just giving you some space here so you don't see the answer before solving the problem)




















There are 6, but many people only find 3 at first. If you only found 3, try it again. If you still can't find all 6, keep trying until you do. There isn't a trick in the instructions; there really are 6 "F"s in the capitalized sentence.









I find this puzzle intriguing because I found 3 at first, then when I was told there were 6 I went over the sentence very carefully (I thought) and still didn't find the others. I'm curious to know how many you find initially, and if it wasn't all 6, how difficult it was for you to find the rest of them.

The explanation I've heard for this is similar to the opening post: that highly literate people don't look at every letter but at word shapes, especially for short words. So when you see "of", your brain refuses to see an O and an F, even when you're going slowly and deliberately looking for an individual letter.

Marion