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Letter Hunt asks you to find every instance of a target letter in a block of text, against the clock. It sounds trivial and it is not — reading is automatic, so your eyes process the text as words rather than as letters, and letters inside common words are systematically missed.
The target letter is shown.
A block of text appears.
Click every occurrence of that letter.
Missing instances and wrong clicks both cost you.
Rounds increase text length and reduce the time.
Overriding automatic reading in favour of letter-level scanning. It is the same inhibition problem as the Stroop task, in a different costume.
Read the text backwards. It breaks word recognition and letter-level scanning becomes much more reliable.
Pay extra attention to short common words — 'the', 'of', 'and'. Letters inside them are the ones people miss.
Use your finger or cursor as a guide. Physically tracking stops your eyes skipping ahead.
Do not sound the text out. Phonological reading makes silent letters invisible.
Frequent words are recognised as whole shapes rather than assembled from letters, so the individual letters never get inspected. This is a well-documented effect in reading research.
Yes — it is the standard proofreading trick for exactly this reason, and it works here too.
The habit transfers directly. It is one of the few games here with a clearly practical application.
Yes, noticeably. If you read by sound, a letter you do not pronounce tends not to register.