Cognitive science is a term that covers quite the broad range of disciplines. It ranges from philosophy to linguistics to neuroscience. It also--and perhaps most pertinently--includes artificial intelligence and psychology. AI, obviously, is needed in most video games to make them compelling, otherwise enemies would just stand there or walk in straight lines into walls and down wells. AI is what powers everything in a video game that doesn't involve predetermined equations (read: physics) or your direct input.

'Our initial scepticism about the hypothesis of the effect raised our curiosity, it could be a good example of how human-computer interaction can have an fundamental effect on human communication,' Dr Garcia told MailOnline. 'We thought data from the web was a good opportunity to test the effect, and to our surprise we found evidence supporting its existence and illustrating some of its limitations.' The pair looked at millions of English-language product names and titles of books, films and video clips that appeared on 11 websites. The websites included Amazon, YouTube and Rotten Tomatoes. Dr David Garcia and Professor Markus Strohmaier wanted to see if the effect had any impact on the way we use words across the web.

These days, writing is typing. And it looks as if the layout of QWERTY keyboards is influencing the way we feel about certain words. Our relationship with the written word has changed in the last few years. We read words differently on a screen to how we read them on paper, for example. And using keyboards – both on phones and computers – has given rise to txtspk and popular acronyms such as "OMG" and "ROFL".