Why kids write letters backward

Key Takeaways

this here is a pile of keepsakes from preschool so what we have is just a standard family portrait some smiling cat masterfully drawn rainbows and flowers and then there's this it's my name written completely backward weird right except I used to do this all the time if it wasn't my full name it was usually just a random letter or number like I did with the G in kindergarten it's called mirror writing and most kids under the age of 7 have done it at some point in some form it seems kind of ridiculous now but it's completely normal it's just a sign of how our brains evolved to see the world learning to write is kind of hard first we have to understand a string of abstract shapes then as we learn we have to understand that an English script goes from left to right early on before really understanding which direction to write in kids like me just wrote where there was empty space available so if I put a K on the right edge of the page I just wrote the rest of my name into the empty space on the left because you know that K is the first letter of your name and they progressed in the right-to-left direction right the K backwards the I and the M would also be written backwards but we don't see that because they look exactly the same Rob McIntosh has studied various forms of mirror writing for years much more common actually is just partial memorizing where the script might go in the correct direction but individual letters will be reversed so maybe the letter D is written as a big orb is written as a deal you might be thinking so what kids are still learning and just don't understand the shapes yet but it's not likely for a kid to take that same letter and flip it completely upside down and we're not talking about them confusing one letter for another entirely remember I didn't use the wrong shapes I use the right ones in the right order just backward so how did I manage to do that the short answer is that children can't tell these mirror images apart at this stage well we tend to think that it's children are bad at discriminating the mirror images but we might turn that around and say that actually the children are very good at generalizing across mirror image forms and it seems to me that that's something the human brain is set up do there's a name for this inability to tell mirror images apart mirror generalization and our adult minds do it all the time to think of the Statue of Liberty you can probably picture that it's a green statue that holds a torch but trying to think that picture Oh God oh I have no idea I mean 50/50 guess I'm gonna say the right hand left torches on the right hand laughs no and you can probably describe the Apple logo a silhouette of an apple with a bite mark out of it but look at this amazing all day if I'm looking at it it's on the left side of the Apple I want to say the right side the left side the left side the trouble is that orientation as in the left or right direction something is facing is rarely committed to memory because in the natural world it doesn't really matter when we see it an animal facing to the left will still recognize it as a dog when it turns around when I'm sitting to the right of someone I'm not suddenly shocked when they turn to face me or move to my left trees plants and animals basically look the same one way or another so our brains cut corners to allow us to recognize these things quickly and commit them to memory without focusing on direction so when it comes to letters and numbers and other things that depend on orientation we have to work a little harder to remember which way is right we have to suppress the tendency to generalize which is actually an amazing feat our brains have evolved some your generalize and we've taught them when and how to turn that skill off [Music]