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Cognitive neuroscience

Practice doesn't make perfect

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It may seem counterintuitive, but we are not very efficient at recognizing even the most common words. This finding suggests strict limits on how flexible we are in learning to recognize new patterns.

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Figure 1: Why are we so inefficient at recognizing words?

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Perceptual Systems and the Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin, 78712, Texas, USA

    Wilson Geisler & Richard Murray

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  1. Wilson Geisler
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  2. Richard Murray
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Correspondence to Wilson Geisler.

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Geisler, W., Murray, R. Practice doesn't make perfect. Nature 423, 696–697 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/423696a

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