Deciphering CAPTCHAs: What a Turing Test Reveals about Human Cognition

Thomas Hannagan, Maria Ktori, Myriam Chanceaux and Jonathan Grainger

PLOS ONE, 2012, vol. 7, issue 3, 1-3

Abstract: Turning Turing's logic on its head, we used widespread letter-based Turing Tests found on the internet (CAPTCHAs) to shed light on human cognition. We examined the basis of the human ability to solve CAPTCHAs, where machines fail. We asked whether this is due to our use of slow-acting inferential processes that would not be available to machines, or whether fast-acting automatic orthographic processing in humans has superior robustness to shape variations. A masked priming lexical decision experiment revealed efficient processing of CAPTCHA words in conditions that rule out the use of slow inferential processing. This shows that the human superiority in solving CAPTCHAs builds on a high degree of invariance to location and continuous transforms, which is achieved during the very early stages of visual word recognition in skilled readers.

Date: 2012
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0032121 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 32121&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0032121

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032121

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().