Figure 1.

Examples of isolated letters and trigrams presented in the four text formats: horizontal, rotated clockwise, rotated counterclockwise, and marquee. Position 0 represents the location of the fixation point. Each stimulus was presented either at fixation, or at a letter position left or right of the midline for the horizontal text format, or above or below the midline for the three vertical text formats. For each format, there were 13 tested letter positions (ranging from −6 to 6). In the horizontal condition, the trigram “hor” is located in letter position 6 with the three letters presented at positions 5 (“h”), 6 (“o”), and 7 (“r”) to the right of the midline, respectively. The isolated letter “x” is positioned at slot −5. For the rotated clockwise condition, the trigram “rig” is presented at position 4 and the letter string covers letter positions 3 to 5 along the vertical midline. The same positioning rule is applied to the marquee condition. The position of marquee trigram “mar” is −3 in the upper visual field, indicating that letters “m” and “r” are at positions −4, and −2, respectively. Unlike the other two vertical formats, the rotated counterclockwise condition has trigram letters arranged from bottom to top. The trigram “lft” is presented at position 0, with the letter “l” at position 1 and the letter “t” at position −1.