Animals and Fonts

Has research ever been done involving the abilities of any animals to judge whether letter forms from different fonts are of the same letter or not?

Rhinos and other large ungulates become enraged by almost any use of the Papyrus font (Norris, 1996). The manta ray and basking shark are both indifferent to Comic Sans, but Franklin Gothic causes them to enter a dissociative fugue state that can often be broken by signs printed in large Impact or Stencil letters (Connelly, 2003). There is some speculation that giraffes have the ability to distinguish between “official” fonts and knockoffs that most humans cannot, but this is currently unsupported by any study.

If there has been any, I hope that they didn’t use tax dollars to finance it.

Why not?

What are federal funds that go into research supposed to be for? Both legally speaking, and in your opinion?

Good reply, Scupper, but in a more factual mood…I’m not aware of those kinds of studies, but it would be good to remember that so far, all of the animal studies related to animal vs. human intelligence have major flaws that prevent firm conclusions from being drawn or tests being repeatable under unbiased conditions.

Some examples are N’kisi (parrot), Washoe & Nim Chimpsky, both chimpanzees, Alex (parrot), and Koko (gorilla).

The flaws often stem from what’s known as the Clever Hans phenomenon, where the trainer is a major factor in interpreting the results, and what’s being tested is more likely the knowledge, communication, and bullshit skills of the trainer than the animal.

Hopefully there wouldn’t be any, because in my opinion it would be a waste of time and funds. Animals can’t read.

I once has a rabbit read my fortune.

[Airplane voice]Looks like you picked a bad time to give up funding research on animal reading abilities.[/Airplane voice]

Just three days ago, the story broke that there’s research showing that, in fact, some animals can distinguish real words from nonsense words, and memorize them.

Baboons Appear to Recognize Real Words from Gibberish.

A guy at language log thinks the study doesn’t say that–and that what it does say, it fails to demonstrate.

But it happens that’s the very event which got me to wondering about fonts.

nm

Yes! Pachyderms can read elefonts!

And Hefalumps can read Helvetica!