On Misoriented Letters

Abstract

An experiment is reported in which subjects were presented with misoriented letters and asked to identify the transformations to which normal letters had been subjected to produce the misorientation. When two or more transformations were equally justifiable from the geometrical point of view, they did not have necessarily the same relevance from the perceptual standpoint. For instance, it was easier for the subjects to see an upside-down letter R as the outcome of two reflections (one about the horizontal axis and one about the vertical axis) rather than of a 180° rotation in the picture plane. Contrary to expectation, for the same final result a reflection—a movement in three dimensions—was preferred to a rotation—a movement in two dimensions—and two reflections were preferred to a single rotation. To explain the distribution of the responses, a hypothesis on the ‘mode of appearance’ of equivocally oriented objects is presented. This postulates that the directional axes assigned to the objects tend to remain in correspondence with those of the environment. Moreover, the polarization of the up–down axis tends to be preserved, while that of the left-right axis does not. Implications of this simple model for the perception of misorientations are discussed.