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News and Views
Nature 423, 696-697 (12 June 2003) | doi:10.1038/423696a
Cognitive neuroscience: Practice doesn't make perfect
Wilson Geisler & Richard Murray
Abstract
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.
If there is any truth to the adage that 'practice makes perfect', we should certainly be near perfect at recognizing common words. As young children, we are taught first to recognize letters, and shortly thereafter words, and then for the rest of our lives we practise word recognition every day — the average literate person has read, at a conservative estimate, a hundred million words by the age of 25, thereby practising the recognition of each common word many hundreds of thousands of times.
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