How good are competitive Scrabble players at recognizing words?

Researchers from the University of Calgary recently published a study (available in PDF or HTML) on how being an elite player in Scrabble tournaments affects one's word recognition ability. Although actually they tested for something much narrower than word recognition: wordness verification.

Basically, the researchers showed the subjects a series of words (half concrete words and half abstract) and non-words and asked them to identify whether or not they were real words as quickly as possible. There were three test groups in the experiment: a group of undergraduates, a group of competitive Scrabble players recruited from a tournament, and a third group of subjects chosen to have the same age distribution as the Scrabble players (with an average age of 57). Additionally, some words were displayed horizontally (like normal words) and others were displayed vertically (like on a Scrabble board).

The researchers found that the undergraduates were the fastest at responding to the word identification tasks (what the journal article terms "lexical decision tasks"), followed by the Scrabble players, and then the age-matched control group. Everyone was slower at identifying abstract words than concrete words, but the Scrabble players had the smallest added delay (120 ms for Scrabble experts versus 270 ms for the control group). The reason that this is interesting is that the added delay for abstract words is believed by some to indicate that people are thinking about the meanings of words when identifying them, and that abstract words take longer to verify due to the extra processing. (A previous study using fMRI scans showed that while certain regions of the brain light up with activity when the subjects are recognizing concrete words, extra regions of the brain come on line when recognizing abstract words.)

The fact that the Scrabble players could recognize abstract words with little additional delay suggests that they are not thinking about word meaning during the word recognition process. This is actually a well-established phenomenon called the concreteness effect.

The two groups of older subjects were far more accurate at identifying words than the undergraduates. Interestingly, Scrabble players and the age-matched group identified horizontal words with quite similar accuracies and speeds, but when the words were arranged vertically, the Scrabble players took a little longer, but had about the same accuracy. The control group took 35-40% longer (though the error bars are big), and made considerably more errors in recognizing words.

The paper then carefully analyzes these results:

The facility with vertical presentation shown by competitive Scrabble players in the present study may be attributable to experience processing words in vertical orientation on the Scrabble board. It is also possible, however, that this facility is due to the extensive word list practice that Scrabble players complete, or to strong word recognition skills that preceded the Scrabble experience. The nature of our design has not allowed us to infer causation.

The subjects were also given a variety of mental tests, and the Scrabble players only did especially well in the Scrabble-related skills (anagramming words and generating words that start with a particular letter). They were able to successfully anagram 3 times more words than the control group and 14 times more words than the undergrads.


The authors conclude the paper well by saying:

The behavior of these visual word recognition experts highlights the experience-driven nature of visual word recognition and pushes the bounds on what we previously considered the endpoint of development of the word recognition system.

So I am inferring from this study that either competitive Scrabble players learn to switch off the parts of the brain that think about the meanings of abstract words or else people who have this skill are preferentially drawn to Scrabble. Either way, someone should rustle up some more Scrabble experts and perform brain scans on them to verify this.

On the effect of body orientation on anagramming speed

When we are standing up, gravity pulls blood down which is detected by "baroreceptors" in the circulatory system. The circulatory system compensates by increasing the heard rate, so that blood pressure in the upper body is maintained. When the baroreceptors register such a blood pressure drop, the locus coeruleus neurons become more active. The locus coeruleus responds to stress by increasing release of norepinephrine (a.k.a., noradrenaline). This has a number of effects, including increasing heart rate and blood flow and boosting motivation, thinking, and alertness. But researchers have found that increases in norepinephrine coincide with a slight slowing of certain kinds of thinking.

The thesis is that "insight problems", the kind where your brain kind of wanders and does background processing, and then suddenly presents a solution in an "A-ha!" moment, happen faster when you have lower norepinephrine levels. A simple "A-ha"-type problem to test, and one which is very popular in psychological research, is anagramming.

In one experiment [M.P. Walker, C. Liston, J.A. Hobson, R. Stickgold, "Cognitive flexibility across the sleep-wake cycle: REM-sleep enhancement of anagram problem solving", Cognitive Brain Research, Volume 14, p.317-324 (2002)], researchers woke people up at different stages of sleep and asked them to solve anagrams. They found that subjects who had just been in REM sleep were better at anagramming than subjects who had been in some other sleep stage. And REM sleep has a lower locus coeruleus activity level.

In another experiment, [D. M. Lipnicki and D. G. Byrne, Cognitive Brain Research, Volume 24, p.719-722 (2005)], researchers had subjects solve 5-letter anagrams (like unscrambling DEFSU to get FUSED) and perform arithmetic problems (73 - 58 + 19 - 26 = ?), while standing up and then while lying down. When standing up, average anagramming time was 29.4s +/- 6.3s. When lying down, average anagramming time was 26.3s +/- 5.4s. The difference in anagramming times (3.1 seconds) is smaller than the standard deviation of the data, but the statistical analysis suggests that the error bars are not that important, allowing us to conclude that the average person in the study anagrammed 10% faster while lying down.

A similar test found that standing is correlated with people solving simple arithmetic problems a few percent faster, but it's such a small difference that it doesn't seem statistically significant.

Summarizing: When you stand up, your body tends to become more alert and less relaxed, and you may anagram slightly slower as a consequence.

Caveats: This study was performed on randomly selected subjects with no proclivity for word games. When given 32 5-letter anagrams to solve, and 45 seconds to solve each in, the average number of solutions was 8 or 9 (whether sitting or standing). A typical Bananagrams player would do significantly better, I would be willing to bet.

I wonder if the cause and effect might flow the other way: if lower blood pressure allows one to anagram faster, can focusing on anagramming cause blood pressure to be temporarily lowered? Or will it just cause one to lie down?

Anagramming is only one of the skills used in playing word games, of course. The kind of concentration necessary to play Bananagrams fast most likely requires the mind to not be in a relaxed state. (And what I'd really like to see is a study on playing Bananagrams itself). Still, whenever the professional Bananagrams league launches, one of the first drugs they should consider regulating is beta-andrenoceptor antagonist propranolol.

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Further reading:

D. M. Lipnicki and D. G. Byrne, "Thinking on your back: Solving anagrams faster when supine than when standing", Cognitive Brain Research, Volume 24, p.719-722 (2005).

If you have access to it through your library, you can get the paper from here.

History of anagrams: Anagrams as encryption

Galileo was a professor in Padua, Italy, studying physics and mathematics, when he heard about the sudden development of telescopes in Holland. Guessing at how they worked, he created his own in 1609 and began promoting it for the monitoring of ships by merchants.
By the fall, he began using it for astronomical observations. He designed a series of successively better telescopes, giving him the ability to discern smaller details of the night sky than anyone before him. This opened up a gold rush of scientific exploration. Galileo was able to make astronomical discoveries very fast, but such discoveries could sometimes take months or years to verify, which left him with a dilemma: If he announced his discovery immediately, he could eventually turn out to have made a mistake; if he waited, one of his competitors might find the same thing and get the credit. Galileo's solution (and possibly one already in use by other scientists) was to write a short description of his findings, rearrange the letters, and distribute the coded version. In that way, he could reveal his conclusions at any time in the future.

In 1610, he sent letters to his fellow scientists, containing the following string of letters:

smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras

Fellow astronomer, Johannes Kepler anagrammed very hard and came up with this solution:

Salve umbistineum geminatum Martia proles.

which translates to "Be greeted, double knob, offspring of Mars", and which Kepler interpreted to mean that Galileo had discovered that Mars has two moons, something that Kepler had predicted. But it turned out that Kepler's anagram was not the one that Galileo had had in mind. Allegedy the Holy Roman Emperor became interested in Galilelo's finding, and so Galileo finally revealed the actual original sentence to be

Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi.

which translates roughly to "I have observed the most distant of planets (Saturn) to have a triple form" (where U and V are treated as interchangeable in Latin). Galileo thought that he had observed two moons orbiting Saturn. He was wrong, as Huygens showed in 1656 that what Galileo had seen was actually a ring around Saturn. Huygens wrote an anagram about this, too.

In December of 1610, Galileo made an even bigger discovery which he transmitted as a true anagram:

Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur oy.

which, translated, means roughly "This was already tried by me in vain prematurely". Kepler pleaded with him to reveal what he had found, and so in January, Galileo replied with the unanagrammed sentence:

Cynthiae figuras aemulatur Mater Amorum.

Translation: "The Mother of Loves [Venus] imitates the figures of Cynthia [the Moon]." by which Galileo meant that Venus cycles through phases, just like the Moon. He had observed that Venus is not a light source - it simply reflects light from the Sun. And from the way it waxed and waned like the Moon, he could tell that Venus was orbiting the Sun. At a time when many held that everything revolved around the Earth, this was an amazing result.

In the 1670s, Robert Hooke was studying the physics of springs. He found that when you stretch a spring, the force that it pulls back with is proportional to the distance that you pull it. This came to be known as Hooke's Law. Hooke encrypted this in a popular way among scientists of the time: He simply alphabetized the letters and got "ceiiinosssttuv". The unscrambled version is "Ut tensio sic vis." which he revealed a few years later to mean "As the extension, so the force.".

Hooke held on to another discovery much longer. In 1671, he announced to the Royal Society of London (a group of scientists, dedicated to advancing scientific knowledge) that he had figured out what the optimal shape for the arch of a bridge was. Four years later, he published the encoded form of his conclusion:
The unanagrammed form was not revealed until after he died in 1703(!). It read "As hangs a flexible cable, so inverted, stand the touching pieces of an arch." which means that if you hang a chain between two poles, you get a special curve called a catenary, and if you turn it upside down, this is the best shape for supporting a bridge.

I am guessing that the practice of anagramming conclusions in this way gradually disappeared as more formal publication methods were developed (the earliest probably being the journals published by the Royal Society of London starting in 1665).

In a way, this kind of encryption was not so different from the seeking of metaphysical truth through anagramming (as covered in a previous post), except that the scientists were deliberately putting the distilled form of the truth on the other end of the anagram and letting people search for it.


For more background on Galileo and his anagrams, you can read http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath151.htm.

For more about Hooke's law and his caternary findings, see: http://www.lindahall.org/events_exhib/exhibit/exhibits/civil/design.shtml.

And for a fictionalized account of 17th century science and the development of the Royal Society (among other things), try Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.