C(2026·南京市玄武外国语学校一模)
Like millions of Americans, I am dyslexic(有读写障碍的). I can't remember which side is my right and which is my left.
I know this makes no sense. After all, I have no problem telling the difference between other things. I know up from down. I know black from white. I know forks from spoons. And yet, I do not know left from right. My brain is not wired that way. This is true for many dyslexics, and I suspect multimodal large language models(MLLMs) may be dyslexic too.
As a kid with dyslexic, school was very hard for me. For example, we humans created two lower-case(小写字体) letters in the English alphabet—"b" and "d"—that are only different because one points left and one points right. For decades, I could not tell the difference. This is a very common problem among dyslexics. The same is true for telling time on traditional clock faces—it only makes sense if you know the difference between clockwise and counterclockwise. These challenges don't end in elementary school. I still remember getting a problem wrong in a Physics class at Stanford because I applied the "right-hand rule" with my left hand.
Dyslexia has nothing to do with focus or intelligence—your brain just works differently from the people who created the cultural conventions we use in symbolic languages, mathematics, and many branches of science. I surely know what's going on. It all relates to the "mind's eye". By this, I mean the way I visualize things inside my mind and store spatial(空间的) elements in memory. When I recall things in my mind(objects, environments, images, or text), I don't visualize them from a fixed first-person perspective. I think about them from all directions at once.
This brings me back to MLLMs that process and
interpret images and videos. These models are remarkable. They can match or exceed human performance on countless tasks, for example, diagnosing cancers from visual slides better than any human. And yet, a recent study found a surprising result: Nowadays all major MLLMs have trouble telling time on analog clocks(模拟时钟). According to the study, GPT-4.0 was only able to correctly read clock faces 8% of the time. Claude-3-5-sonnet was worse at 6%. Gemini 2.0 was the best, but still at only 20%.
These numbers are surprisingly low, especially when you consider that these AI models can perform so well in other contexts. This is surprisingly similar to dyslexia in humans, not just in the simple artefacts that cause problems like clocks, but in the contradictory mix of strengths and weaknesses that enables a person like me to earn a PhD(博士学位) and work successfully as a computer scientist and engineer, and yet still fail the "turn-left-here" test.
(
C
)8. The phrase "mind's eye"(Paragraph 4) refers to
C
.
A. literal visual perception through biological eyes
B. a medical device used to treat dyslexia
C. the brain's ability to form and store mental images
D. a metaphor for intelligence quotient(IQ)
(
B
)9. What does the underlined word "interpret" in Paragraph 5 mean?
A. Learn.
B. Understand.
C. Explain.
D. Translate.
(
A
)10. Why do MLLMs struggle to read analog clocks accurately according to the passage?
A. Their cognitive process of spatial information is similar to that of dyslexic humans.
B. They were primarily trained on digital clocks, leaving analog clock recognition underdeveloped.
C. Clock faces require understanding of cultural conventions, which AI lacks compared to humans.
D. Their visual recognition systems focus more on object detection like cancer diagnosis than directional interpretation.
(
D
)11. Why does the author emphasize that he failed a physics task due to left-right confusion yet ultimately earned a PhD?
A. To argue that universities should lower some standards for dyslexic students.
B. To suggest AI could make up for human limitations in scientific research.
C. To reflect that physics is uniquely difficult for people with spatial processing differences.
D. To highlight that dyslexia's problems are particular rather than reflective of overall intellectual ability.
(
C
)12. Which of the following might be the best title of the passage?
A. The Complete Guide to Dyslexia Treatments
B. When Machines Mirror Human Learning Disabilities
C. Are Large Language Models Dyslexic?
D. Why Schools Must Adapt to Dyslexic Students
