Why do we tend to miss errors or repetitions when we read?

Has this ever happened to you? You have an essay you need to submit for school. You take your time gathering the facts and putting them on paper. You read it once to check for errors. But just as you are about to put the paper in a folder, you hear this voice in your head telling you, “Look again!” and you do. And upon closer inspection…your eyes catch errors that were hidden in plain sight! Spelling mistakes and word repetitions fill your vision! These errors may be small, but once you see them, it is hard to miss them when you look at the text again. Even when you are writing an English test, it is not until your teacher highlights a spelling error with a red pen that you realise it is there. So, here’s the question: What causes the mind to breeze over such corrections in the first place?

The top-down process

First things first, how are some errors not identified on the first read? Well, to answer that, we must first be made familiar with the top-down process. In this process, when a person reads a text, they utilise their prior knowledge on the topic being written to comprehend the content, rather than going through every single word. Here, your brain will process existing knowledge in order to make sense of new information, and the process of reading will be done relying on prior knowledge and expectations of what the text will show. But in this, you will rely less on what your eyes see and more on what your mind recognises and recalls.

Expectations and peripherals

One factor to also take into account is your peripheral vision. When you read a text,  you are not reading with your normal direct vision, which is pointed at the words in your sightline; you are also utilising your peripheral vision to read words outside the point of fixation (the single place where one’s gaze is focused). In this process, both our peripherals and our expectations of what the next word will be, contribute to the mistake of missing errors. If a reader reads a sentence with a pre-conceived idea on the topic and the content, it will cause them to skip over groups of words that may hold errors within them. When you see the beginning of certain sentences, you may have a good idea of how they are going to end, causing your eyes to unintentionally skip over to the next line. For example: “The quick brown fox junped over the lazy dog” 

This is a famous sentence known for having every single letter of the alphabet. But how many of you noticed that the word “jumped” was misspelled? If you didn’t, then you just read with your expectations rather than your eyes!

Function and content

The fovea (the part of the eye’s retina where eyesight is at its sharpest) is where the highest focus is placed on the words being read. To be more specific, it is the part of the eye that holds the image of the words we mostly focus on when reading. Another reason why certain small errors may become overlooked is that small words like articles (a, an, and the) or conjunctions (for, but, so, etc.) can be read outside of the fovea in the parafovea. Our eyes tend to focus more on content words rather than function words. An experiment was conducted by researchers Andrew Cohen, Adrian Staub, and Sophia Dodge, where the participants were made to read sentences with errors and were provided with a binary ‘Yes/No’ choice as to whether or not anything was wrong with the sentence. The observation made was that the majority of the participants made errors when function words like ‘the’ were presented twice in the same sentence, not recognising the mistake. However, when a noun was repeated, many were able to identify it!

Prevention tips

Now, errors in proofreading are not something we want to commit. There are methods, following which we can prevent overlooking these small minute errors:

1. Reading aloud

2. Double-checking content

3. Enlarging your font or handwriting

4. Checking small chunks of information as soon as they are written

5. Edit content (if typed) with online grammar tools