Context is king
![Context is King illustration: the capital letters A, B and C are handwritten in sequence on the top row. On the bottom row, it's the numbers 12, 13 and 14 - again handwritten. When you look closely, you notice that the letter B and the number 13 take exactly the same form. It is only the characters that come before and after in each sequence that define them.](https://images.prismic.io/sketchplanations/54aaa859-b561-49fc-8e1c-9b6ef0338eb7_SP+725+-+Context+is+king.png?auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=max&w=3840&q=50)
It's been called the expectation effect. Is it a B or a 13? It appears that how we see depends on the context and what we expect to see.
This neat example is from a 1955 experiment by Jerome Bruner and A. Leigh Minturn. One of the findings, other than people seamlessly identifying a B or 13 when surrounded appropriately by letters or numbers, was that when asked to draw what they saw "as is" participants were more inclined to draw a closed or partially closed B when it was surrounded by letters. What participants expected to see appeared to affect what they did see.
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