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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The brain uses minimum effort to look for key information in text:

A recently completed study indicates that the human brain avoids taking unnecessary effort. When a person is reading, she strives to gain as much information as possible by dedicating as little of her cognitive capacity as possible to the processing.

[...] According to the study, the brain is processing information by taking into account the relative importance of the content that is being read. When the brain is interpreting the meaning of the words being read, it attempts to allocate resources to interpreting the words that provide as much information as possible on the content of the text.

[...] In the recently published study, the perspective was expanded to the level above individual sentences, the discourse level. It was studied using six-sentence paragraphs. At this level, the relationship between words becomes increasingly complex, and the significance of context in interpreting individual words is increased. On the discourse level, very little about information processing by the brain has been known so far.

[...] "When someone reads the sentence 'Cats are small, usually furry mammals', words such as 'mammal' and 'furry' evoke a particular pattern of brain activity. This suggests that the brain is efficiently processing information: concentrating its efforts there where the most additional value in understanding the message is to be gained," says Michiel Spapé, a senior researcher who contributed to the study.

A related finding revealed that, by using AI-based techniques, brain measurements pertaining to individual words can be used to predict whether the information gain for the words read is low or high.

[...] Ruotsalo points out that the research is only at its basic stage.

Journal Reference:
Lauri Kangassalo, Michiel Spapé, Niklas Ravaja, et al. Information gain modulates brain activity evoked by reading [open], Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-63828-5)

Original Submission