ABSTRACT
A note from Ken Goodman: Some years ago, Fred Gollasch (1980) designed a simple experiment using an adaptation of a one-paragraph story for his doctoral dissertation, The Boat in the Basement. I developed the story to illustrate for audiences how perception works in reading. In his study Gollasch asked readers in middle school and college to read the adaptation and either look for errors or read for meaning. The story had six embedded errors. Both groups failed to find the majority of these errors in both stories.
