Ages ago someone told me that most readers will not spot a double-the in a sentence. Something about the way we process words apparently filters out the extraneous "the" but I don't know what that process is called. Does it have an explicit term? What is it?
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Related: “The thing is, is that…”– FumbleFingersCommented Jun 30, 2014 at 20:13
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2 Answers
This is referred to here and numerous other places as "top-down vs. bottom-up" processing, and is a cognitive error rather than a visual one - that is, the illusion is caused by filtering of the material seen to match expectations as opposed to a true visual illusion, which exploits faulty visual processing.
The original illusion is stronger than it is in the title here because the phrase is broken across lines:
PARIS IN THE
THE SPRING
On a quick glance, the "top-down" processing matches the sentence against similar phrases familiar to the reader, and results in a match to "PARIS IN THE SPRING", and the perception that this is what is there. In contrast, if the reader specifically reads each word separately -- "bottom-up" processing -- they look at one word at a time, and see
PARIS IN THE THE SPRING
thereby detecting the duplicate "THE".
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Searching the internet for the term "top-down processing" found many examples similar to this phenomenon. Very interesting!– MrHenCommented Jul 3, 2014 at 4:06
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I had forgotten until this minute that the movie "Attack of The The Eye Creatures" has exactly this same error in its title. Commented Mar 31, 2016 at 2:44
It's probably reasonable to to say that it is a facet of inattention blindness.
It's a factor of how our minds filter stimuli for consumption.
I don't know if there is a more specific term that applies.
