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Do we recognize common objects by parts, or as wholes? Holistic recognition would be efficient, yet people detect a grating of light and dark stripes by parts. Thus efficiency falls as the number of stripes increases, in inverse proportion, as explained by probability summation among independent feature detectors. It is inefficient to detect correlated components independently. But gratings are uncommon artificial stimuli that may fail to tap the full power of visual object recognition. Familiar objects become special as people become expert at judging them^,, possibly because the processing becomes more holistic. Letters and words were designed to be easily recognized, and, through a lifetime of reading, our visual system presumably has adapted to do this as well as it possibly can. Here we show that in identifying familiar English words, even the five most common three-letter words, observers have the handicap …