Word search puzzles have, like crosswords and arrowords, been very popular in the United Kingdom, and - also in common with these latter puzzles - have had complete magazines devoted to them. Word searches are commonly found in daily newspapers and puzzle books. Some teachers use them as educational tools for children, the benefit being that young minds can learn new words and their spellings by intensively searching for them, letter by letter, in the puzzle. A common strategy for finding all the words is to go through the puzzle left to right (or vice versa) and look for the first letter
Word recognition reduce activation to words in one's memory with a dissimilar appearance. This neural strengthening of connections to relevant letters and words, as well as the simultaneous weakening of associations with irrelevant ones, eventually activates the correct word as part of word recognition in the neural network. Using positron emission tomography (PET) scans and event-related potentials, researchers have located two separate areas in the fusiform gyrus that respond specifically to strings of letters. The posterior fusiform gyrus responds to words and non-words, regardless of their semantic context. The anterior fusiform gyrus is affected by the semantic context, and whether letter combinations