On the Legibility of Mirror-Reflected and Rotated Text
Department of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557, USA
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Academic Editor: Marco Bertamini
Symmetry 2017, 9(3), 28; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym9030028
Received: 23 December 2016
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Revised: 16 February 2017
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Accepted: 17 February 2017
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Published: 23 February 2017
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Symmetry in Vision)
We happened to observe that text that was reflected about either the horizontal or vertical axis was more difficult to read than text that was reflected about first one and then the other, which amounts to a 180-degree rotation. In this article, we review a number of studies that examine the nature of recognizing reflected and inverted letters, and the frequency of mirror reversal errors (e.g., confusing 'b' for 'd') in children and adults. We explore recent ideas linking the acquisition of literacy with the loss of mirror-invariance, not just for text, but for objects in general. We try to connect these various literatures to examine why certain transformations of text are more difficult to read than others for adults.
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Keywords:
mirror-reversal; left-right reversal; reading; reversal errors; mirrored text
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MDPI and ACS Style
Erlikhman, G.; Strother, L.; Barzakov, I.; Caplovitz, G.P. On the Legibility of Mirror-Reflected and Rotated Text. Symmetry 2017, 9, 28. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym9030028
AMA Style
Erlikhman G, Strother L, Barzakov I, Caplovitz GP. On the Legibility of Mirror-Reflected and Rotated Text. Symmetry. 2017; 9(3):28. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym9030028
Chicago/Turabian StyleErlikhman, Gennady, Lars Strother, Iskra Barzakov, and Gideon P. Caplovitz. 2017. "On the Legibility of Mirror-Reflected and Rotated Text" Symmetry 9, no. 3: 28. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym9030028
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