Do symmetrical letter pairs affect readability?

2005

Our everyday experience shows that we have problems in recognizing objects which only differ in their symmetry properties (street signs with two arrows in different directions or mathematical signs such as 〈 and 〉). Perception is closely correlated with an inner comparison: the perceived object with its surrounding, the perceived object with former experience and so on. The brain has evolved different constancy abilities (e.g. colour constancy) and one of them is object constancy. This object constancy makes it possible to perceive an object regardless of its orientation in space. Symmetric letter pairs with different sound representations (such as 〈b〉 and 〈d〉) are, due to object constancy,…