Perceptual Habits Research Articles

The Phenomenological Case for Stricter Regulation of Cell Phones and Driving

The case is made here for stricter regulations on the use of cell phones (both handheld and hands-free) while driving. I review, contextualize, and expand on a phenomenological account of distracted driving that I have developed across a series of papers. This account remains consistent with the empirical literature on the driver distraction of cell phones, but it also offers an alternative theory on why the distraction of cell phone conversation poses such a considerable danger. My argument is that cell phone distraction results from learned perceptual habits, and that breaking these deeply engrained habits is no simple matter.

Negotiating the Image of the City: A Discussion of Skilled Perception and the Role of Artists in the Redevelopment of Bjørvika

In the master plan of the redevelopment of the former industrial harbor Bjørvika, funding for art is stipulated along with access to the site during the construction phase. This article looks at an intervention, from 2005, of the artist Marianne Heier, in relation to the strategic use of imagery in place branding and the use of images to structure change. The epistemological dimension of images will be argued to have ontological implications on how we perceive the world and consequently act upon it. This article suggests the need for a critical approach to mediated images in the context of urban development. By discussing the relationships between Lorraine Daston’s use of the notion of ‘skilled perception’ and Jaques Rancière’s concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, I attempt to draw attention to how our perception is skilled and thus affects what we hold in common. Ultimately, the formation of public spaces is the subject of the article and by pointing to the role that images play, as the way we see the city is shaped, this paper shapes the need for images that unveil otherwise unrepresented potentials and interests. The notion of skilled perception is presented as a tool for investigating how mediated images in Bjørvika form the basis of perceptual habits, and are suggested to be of use in grasping the “politics” of artistic interventions within the larger constructed image of Bjørvika.

Placemaking and transnationalism: recent migrants and a national park in Sydney, Australia

A study of the way Arab and Vietnamese migrants engage with a national park environment in southwest Sydney, Australia, has highlighted the agency of these people as they not merely adapt to that environment but actively make places for themselves in it. The concept of placemaking is useful particularly in showing that ‘place’ can be constructed out of social practice, emotion and affect, and does not have to entail physical impact on or alteration of the existing environment. Migrants bring with them into the park many of the perceptual habits, cultural ‘ways’, and expectations about nature that were formed in their homelands. Participants in the study also reported that certain elements of the park environment, including the river, strongly evoked and triggered memories of their homelands. They experienced being in two places at once. The concept of transnationalism allows us to understand how a national park environment can, for certain people, be situated in transnational more than national space. Transnational connectivity is helping to destabilise park boundaries much the way that, from another perspective, wildlife corridors and the theory and practice of connectivity conservation view them as ideally porous.

Zawieszenie wzroku w czasie

W jaki sposób spojrzenie na ekran może konstytuować doświadczenie widza? Na ile, jako oglądający, jesteśmy różni od samych siebie, a na ile do nich podobni? W jaki sposób stajemy się zaangażowani i kiedy kino wywołuje nas do odpowiedzi? Rainer Werner Fassbinder rzuca wyzwanie oku widza, wywracając na opak przyzwyczajenia percepcyjne, interpretacyjne i skłaniając do zmiany w rozumieniu pojęcia kina zaangażowanego czy politycznego.

Golden Perception: Simulating Perceptual Habits of the Past

Medieval times were neither dark nor grey; natural light illuminated colourful scenes depicted in paintings through coloured windows and via artificial beeswax candlelight. When we enter, for example, a church to inspect its historic treasures ranging from mosaics to depictions of saints, we do this under quite unfavourable conditions; particularly as we mainly depend on artificial halogen, LED or fluorescent light for illuminating the desired object. As these light spectrums are different from the natural light conditions under which the old masterpieces were previously developed and perceived, the perceptual effects may dramatically differ, leading to significantly altered affective and cognitive processing. Different qualities of processing might particularly be triggered when perceiving artworks which deal with specific material prone to strong interaction with idiosyncratic light conditions, for instance gold-leafed surfaces that literally start to glow when lit by candles. We tested the perceptual experiences of a figurative piece of art which we created in 3 (foreground) by 3 (background) versions, illuminated under three different light conditions (daylight, coloured light and beeswax candlelight). Results demonstrated very different perceptual experiences with stunning effects for the interaction of the specific painting depicted on a gold-leafed background lit by candlelight.

An untrained eye: the tachistoscope and photographic vision in early experimental psychology

In 1906, the psychologist Walter Dearborn published a set of photographs that mark an important moment in the history of scientific epistemologies of vision. 1 Taken as part of Dearborn’s dissertat...

Environmental silence and its renditions in a movie soundtrack

Audio technology and contemporary sonic environments have affected perceptual habits at both individual and communal levels. As the perception of sound fluctuates between modes of attention and inattention, the narrative expectations generated by sonic materials may follow patterns of individual physical response that would in turn modify some communal perceptions of environmental soundscapes, silences in particular. In current sound design practice and the mainstream movie industry, the use of absolute silence as an absence of sound seems almost irrelevant. Film silence has become the complex technical product of mixing sounds, a view that departs from silence as a broad sound element added to vocal enunciation, music and special sound effects. As a subtle component of a narrative, cinematic silence may be at the junction of representation and reproduction of the acoustic biomass that we create and communicate to others. This paper examines how the subjective enaction of audio-filmic silence could develop from evolving acoustic ecologies, corporeal integration and cultural convention. In such a context, film silence could be a reciprocal tool that may generate modes of expression used to assess our personal and communal notions of environmental silences.

Making sure. A comparative micro-analysis of diagnostic instruments in medical practice

This article conceptualises diagnosis as ongoing practical judgement in medical care. Based on pragmatist and phenomenological considerations of tools in use, it uses a comparative approach to analyse similarities and differences in the use of diagnostic technologies. In the first part of the paper, a historical perspective on the innovation of the stethoscope is used to highlight the transformations in diagnostic practices occasioned by novel diagnostic instruments. In the second part of the paper, ethnographic accounts of contemporary anaesthesia are presented in order to sketch out the manifold variations of using diagnostic instruments in daily practice. Both cases are analysed on a micro-analytical level, emphasising the interrelations of bodies, tools and knowledge in concrete situations. The analysis shows how diagnostic instruments become embodied in the perceptual habits of physicians and how diagnosing becomes an ongoing activity in the course of managing an illness trajectory.

Digital (A)Literacy

This article investigates the tendency of those who explore the topic of ‘electronic literacies’ to downplay the fundamental nature and importance of the perceptual habits associated with print literacy, and highlights the opposite tendency of reading and writing specialists to decontextualize the acquisition of these fundamental skills from the character of the culture at large. Making the case for a perspective located somewhere between these two positions, which attends to cognitive and neurological distinctions between our media interfaces, the author surveys a number of purported social trends in the United States. Among these are the increased rates of television viewing; the inadequacy of writing practice and instruction in American educational institutions; and the migration of writing, typing, and reading to the computer screen. In relation to these trends, he considers our prospects for the cultivation of a type of ‘secondary literacy’, in order that we might attain a kind of equilibrium within the cultural conditions that Walter Ong describes as ‘secondary orality’ – a phenomenon inherent in our general reliance on the most common electronic communication forms, which, in the communication contexts that they create, predominantly employ the spoken word and moving imagery.

Perception, Imagination, and the Self: Pierre Alferi’s Fmn

Perception, Imagination, and the Self: Pierre Alferi’s Fmn Kate Lermitte Campbell (bio) Pierre Alferi plays directly on the visual dynamics of thought throughout his work, exploring what we see, what we don’t, and the extent to which this is conditioned by both sensory and linguistic habit. His poetry not only manifests the extent to which the relation between thought and experience is dynamic and interactive, it challenges the traditional dividing line between perceptual and imaginative experience. This has direct repercussions on our conception of the individual. In order to elaborate on these claims, I will focus on Fmn, drawing from recent work by the philosopher Colin McGinn. My aim is to suggest that Alferi’s concentration on the visual is bound to his belief that actual experience cannot be compartmentalized into experience of the real world on the one hand, and that of imaginary worlds on the other. Thought, for him, is characterized by the dynamic interaction of the two, and this makes experience what it is. All of his work is marked by his awareness of and attentiveness to this crossover. The role sensory experience plays in thought is largely dependent on perceptual habits developed throughout life. Film has, for example, become part of the way we see, and hence part of the way we think, and Alferi’s experimentation with film—reflected even in his most “textual” work—constitutes less an extrapolation from everyday experience of the world than a necessary outcome of his reflection on the nature of such experience. Hence his remark: “pour rendre compte de sa propre sentiment présent, il faut s’inventer des outils, des techniques ” (interview with P. Cassagneau, 2005). The alteration of perceptual habits necessitates the constant re-direction of the poet’s attention and the re-shaping of his tools in accordance with the matter of his experience. As I have discussed elsewhere, his “films-parlants” explore the nature of narrative structure and his “cinépoèmes” are direct reflections on the relation between the poetic act and the act of reading: they explore the way individual sentences can be made to function through manipulation of their syntax and of their visual and phonetic qualities (Campbell, 2008). Alferi’s experimentation with the DVD is therefore vital to his creative exploitation of the visual dynamics of thought. [End Page 91] In Alferi’s novel Fmn (1994), the nature of the narrator’s visual perception is not the result of self-imposed experimentation (as is the case in Le Chemin familier du poisson combatif); it stems from his hyperawareness of a potential other, manifested in the REGARD. The first line of the back cover description of this text reads as follows: “Un homme se dit prisonnier du regard d’une femme.” The first line of the book takes the form of a statement: “J’attendais une femme,” with an unexpected, added qualification: “cette femme était réelle” (9). The narrator’s use of the word “réelle” here is, however, rendered ambiguous, for it becomes clear that the woman’s presence does not imply her visibility: “jamais elle ne m’apparut” (11). What is more, throughout the book she remains nameless, and without any particular physical trait: Elle se logeait dans un regard, s’y résumait, s’y contractait pour s’y dissoudre, s’y émietter, s’y émettre et m’atteindre. Elle était ce REGARD sans yeux, le regard qui, dit-on, passe par eux quoiqu’il se passe d’eux peu souvent. Sans yeux, oui, non sans point d’émission, il se situait à quelques mètres en amont, inondant ma face de trois quarts. Onde et particules de conscience constamment renouvelées, feu nourri, rayon paisible régénéré. (13) Here, the “reality” of the woman is dissociated from any identity criteria we typically use to designate an individual; her existence seems to depend primarily on the dynamics of the narrator’s gaze. The word “virtuel” is relevant. It comes from the Latin virtus (defined as “la puissance souveraine de ce qui n’apparaît pas visiblement”) and is used to describe something that “n’est tel qu’en puissance, qui est à l’état de simple...

‘A proper medium’: Early motorists’ perception of the European landscape

The dozens of writings on traveling Europe by motor car published between 1900 and 1914 suggest a broad enthusiasm regarding novel modes of seeing that were afforded by the new technology: consistently, the authors emphasized the degree of flexibility and spontaneity offered by the motor car, and contrasted travel by car with train travel, which was often cast as undesirably rigid. They also stressed the speeds attainable in motor cars, and began to describe a related development of perceptual habits, claiming that motorists gradually learned to see the landscape through a series of increasingly rapid and detailed impressions. Above all, however, these accounts accented the immediacy of experience possible in the motor car, arguing that its openness granted motorists a fuller, more direct experience of the environment. Yet a close reading of the texts reveals that early motorists’ interactions with the landscape were never, in fact, fully unmediated. Instead, motorists saw their surroundings through a number of filters, conventions and preconceptions that affected their reactions. From the uncomfortable goggles worn by most motorists to the guidebooks that they took with them, they perceived the passing environment through lenses that ranged from concrete to abstract; indeed, even the value of their cars acted as a material symbol that often differentiated them from their rural surroundings. As a result, these early texts point to a central tension, also visible in other discourses of the period, between a desire for direct access and an abiding interest in preserving social and cultural boundaries.

Réapprendre à voir le monde : Rééduquer les personnes atteintes de dégénérescence maculaire en exploitant les capacités perceptives et cognitives de la vision périphérique

ABSTRACTAge-related macular degeneration (ARMD) is a frequent cause of vision loss among people over age of 60. It is an aging process involving a progressive degradation of the central retina. It does not induce total blindness, since it does not affect the peripheral vision. Nonetheless, it makes difficult to read, drive, and perform all daily activities requiring fine details perception. Low-vision care consists in inducing an eccentric fixation so that relevant visual targets impact an unaffected retinal locus. It is necessary but not sufficient to enhance visual extraction. The present work aims to draw the attention of low-vision professionals to the necessity of developing new re-education tools. Beyond theperceptualre-education linked to an optimization of visual information extraction, acognitivere-education should also be provided in order to enhance the interpretation processes. Indeed, the spatial-frequency properties of the visual world no longer match patient perceptual habits. The visually impaired person has to learn again to use these new sensory data in an optimal way. Contextual information can be a precious help in this learning process. An experimental study involving young people provides elements for another method of low-vision care, in terms of visual cognitive re-education.

Vers une image symptomatique : Don DeLillo et la crise de l'évidence

Among the various concepts of image in DeLillo’s fiction, this study investigates what it problematically defines as the evident image (in its industrial forms: photography, television, video). Its symptomatic qualities (impact, denotation, expressiveness) make it a sharp instrument for questioning the characters’ dealings with signs and confronting them with their fascination for truer than life representations. On account of its essential elusiveness, it is also limitative: it upsets perceptual habits and destabilizes language insofar as it becomes incapable of grasping experience. To go beyond this stage of critical recognition, the character/viewer regularly attempts to deconstruct the image, isolate its element of obviousness, through compulsive manipulations (of which repeating, freezing and enlarging are three exemplary forms).

The Urge to Sameness

The Urge to Sameness Perry Nodelman (bio) What most struck me on first reading Rod McGillis's response to "Pleasure and Genre" was not something he says but something I said myself. Rod quite rightly chastises me for describing how texts of children's fiction invite us to "view the world as a child." Surely, I told myself, as I read these words, I hadn't actually said that? A frantic search through my own piece soon revealed the horrid truth: the offending words were there. I had, indeed, done exactly what I spend much of my professional life getting angry at others about.1 I had based my reading of children's books on a generalization about children. I hasten to say that I didn't really mean it—not in the way that Rod takes it. I was talking not about some existing "child" who might represent the behavior of a body of actual living children but about an intellectual construct, the concept of a child as unlike and opposite to adults because of a presumed innocence, a divergence from adult forms of thought. It is the perceptions of that imaginary child that I see adult and child readers sharing as they make their way through a text of children's fiction. That adults can experience it—for that matter, that adults writers are the ones who imagine it in the first place—suggests how detachable from the perceptual habits of living children I believe this construct to be. Indeed, the major thrust of Tom Travisano's comments is to focus on my saying that and to suggest I am wrong about it—to make the case that there is in fact a generalizable childhood accurately represented by texts and existing in the world outside them. Such an essentialized childhood might indeed influence children as a self-fulfilling prophesy, a result of adults who believe it to be true acting as if it were true. But I remain committed to the position that this or any conception of childhood as a generalizable state distinct from other generalized states of being human exists primarily in human thought and language and is not, as Tom and the cognitive psychologists he quotes would have it, "hard-wired into our cognitive development." I'll say more about that later. [End Page 38] Meanwhile, though, I can't be too hard on Tom and the psychologists when my sentence about viewing as a child replicates their behavior—when I myself so easily slipped into the very behavior I was in the process of separating myself from. Similarly, Rod is right to notice that my suspicion "that many child readers read as I do" implies a desire to homogenize reading, an urge to sameness. I meant to say something a little different, and I didn't say it clearly enough: not that actual readers inherently or even ideally share my reading strategies but that texts of children's fiction tend to set up conditions that invite readers to make sense of them in the ways I describe. This behavior might more accurately be ascribed to what reader-response theorists identify as "implied readers" than to real ones and represent ways in which the texts indicate and invite certain forms of meaning-making from those competent to interact with them as expected. I don't doubt that many readers do not act as expected, nor does it much bother me that they don't.2 I do, though, suspect that many readers do in fact do what texts invite—that for good or ill, and despite personal differences, many of us do learn the competencies that allow us at least some degree of understanding of what writers and speakers want us to understand. Indeed, discussing what it is that texts seem to intend to do—determining how they might manipulate readers for or against their better interests—would hardly be worth doing if we believed that it never actually worked and that the texts did in fact always communicate entirely different things to different readers. Rod knows that, of course. If he didn't, he wouldn't be concerned about whether we need to make...

Metaphor and Metonymy, Color and Space, in Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia

Structurally, the coordinate title Sea and Sardinia suggests metonymy and synecdoche. As Lawrence remarks at the outset of a later of travel sketches: says Mexico: one means, after all, one little town.... All it amounts to is one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the page of his exercise book (Mornings 3). through selection and combination, one moment can stand for many and one place for a country or ethos. What Lawrence called Spirit of Place is born of a momentary interaction between the writer's perspective powers, shaped his experience, and external geography. In this encounter the strange and the familiar throw each other into relief; the traveler looks inward as well as outward and compares the scene before him with remembered scenes. stimulus of unfamiliar landscapes can activate the deepest desires, dreams, and values (cf. Tracy 2-3). Mark Schorer affirms, is probably no other writer in literary history whose works responded so immediately to his geographical environment as Lawrence, and certainly there is no other modern writer to whose imagination `place' made such a direct and intense appeal (282). In his review of H. M. Tomlinson's Gifts of Fortune, Lawrence proclaims: We travel, perhaps, with a secret and absurd hope of setting foot on the Hesperides.... One gradually gets a new vision of the world, if one goes through the disillusion absolutely. It is a world where all things are alive (Phoenix 343, 345). To Lawrence, the quest for the Hesperides gave way to the challenge of self-discovery. traveler brings his perceptual habits and expectations with him, but his vision is renewed new scenes. Sea and Sardinia fully exploits Lawrence's volatile, hypersensitive temperament. suppose one carries one's own self wherever one goes, he writes. But one undergoes a metamorphosis also (Letters III: 353). self, scenes in memory or geological strata, is many-layered. Aware of his own changeable responses, Lawrence acknowledges that Italy has given me back I know not what of myself, but a very, very great deal. She has found for me so much that was lost: a restored Osiris. But, he adds, apart from the great rediscovery backwards . . . there is a move forwards. There are unknown, unworked lands where the salt has not lost its savour (Sea 131). Such primordial landscapes include the Sardinian moors. Lawrence considered Sea and Sardinia an exact and real travel book: no stunt, rather a marvel of veracity, and pretty vivid as a flash-light travel book (Letters IV: 27, 35, 58-59). reality and vividness of the writing are based on immediate perception; Lawrence relives his travels in the act of writing them. We are always in the smithy, says Anthony Burgess, watching the verbal hammering (110). Burgess, who finds Sea and Sardinia by far the best introduction to [Lawrence's] oeuvre, adds: The sharpness of Lawrence's eye is incredible. flexible prose combined with sharp observation in loosely articulated structures suggests a writer on holiday from more strenuous tasks. Metonymy dominates in travel writings, where direct visual experience precedes commentary and reflection. there are frequent shifts from metonymy to metaphor (Jakobson) and from thing-in-itself to things as geographical,, psychological, or cultural signs. Objects juxtaposed in space on the combinative axis of perception (metonymy) fuse with projections on the substitutive axis of imagination (metaphor). Lawrence's visual representation is so vivid that Sea and Sardinia can be seen in spatial terms, unrolling the journey, or like a highly colored Oriental processional scroll, crowded, brilliant, clearly drawn, largely objectified and curiously detached (Weiner 233). form is mimetic but the vision is open to continuous transmutation. Lawrence launches Sea and Sardinia with a list of items to be packed. …

Frost's Synecdochism

T HE reader of Frost can hardly help noticing a recurrent structural tendency in the nature lyrics: again and again, the poems move naturally description of an object or scene or event to a commentary or meditation on its significance. This pattern may be perfectly obvious, as in Design (where it is also particularly appropriate to the subject of the poem's meditation). It may be considerably less obvious (as in The Wood-Pile or On the Heart's Beginning to Cloud the Mind); or it may be submerged, as it is in Birches, almost hidden beneath the complexities of other kinds of twistings and turnings. But the basic pattern-the movement from sight to insight (p. 559), as the poet himself puts it-is altogether characteristic of the way Frost's mind works. It reflects a whole way of perceiving reality: fundamental epistemological assumptions, perceptual habits, linguistic assumptions, and structural preferences. It is, moreover, a highly conscious way of perceiving and writing, a practical poetics which Frost developed largely Emersonian suggestions.

Children's Problem Solving in Relation to Perceptual Habit

The left-to-right and top-to-bottom perceptual scanning habits established in reading were hypothesized to transfer to a problem-solving task, lessening effectiveness of problem solving where the habitual response did not coincide with the demands of the problem. Responses of 120 first-grade children to seven problems were studied; the child was asked to press bulbs in a 5 × 5 array to determine which of two or more alternative patterns was “correct.” The majority of initial bulb presses were in positions predicted from reading habits (upper left corner, middle of the top row, or middle of the left column of the array). Those subjects initially pressing one of the predicted bulbs scored significantly more poorly than subjects initially pressing other bulbs on those problems where the upper left bulbs did not contain information relevant to the solution of the problem.

Reply to Braine: Reexamination of a Child's-Eye View

We stand by our original conclusion that for a developmental analysis, upright orientation should not be inferred from judged upside-down orientation with a binary-vertical method. We believe that our more general procedures are more appropriate for research on orientation and form perception. Our differences with Lila Ghent Braine appear to be mainly in interest and emphasis. Braine wants to restrict the analysis of form orientation to basic underlying perceptual processes (such as focal point); we want to expand it to include other, culturally derived factors. Braine therefore must eliminate reading-based perceptual habits from form-orientation judgments, and argues that this can be accomplished by using a binary-vertical procedure that precludes letter-appropriate judgments of forms that resemble horizontally oriented letters and by restricting testing to preschoolers. She also says that, in any event, letter-appropriate judgments are obvious and require no explanation. We think that perceptual habits derived from reading or, in the case of preschoolers, from prereading instruction in letter identification (particularly now, with "Sesame Street") are embedded in nearly any experimental situation, and we do not believe that letter- or reading-appropriate responses are so simple to detect and understand. Let us consider each of her points. Statistical assessment of effects of binary-vertical procedure The logic underlying our statistical procedure was that if a binary-vertical procedure like Braine's (one that forces the child to choose between only the two vertical orientations of a bilaterally symmetrical form) does not significantly constrain the subject's range of judgments, then we would expect that our subjects, who were free to make orientation judgments in nonvertical categories, nevertheless would restrict their choices to the two

Congruity and Incongruity of Status Attributes within Occupations and Work Positions

First, psychoanalytically-based hypothesis predicting the nature of interpretations of Negrowhite/mixed-sex interaction was not supported. A much simpler theoretical basis for explaining the direction of the influence of attitudes on perception was found in the perceptual defense type of theory from experimental psychology. However, perceptual defense theory depends almost entirely upon the functioning of individual psychological processes. Such theory has limitations in that it does not account for the selectivity of perception found in situations involving major cultural themes or shared expectations. That is, where cultural themes such as the romantic complex or domination of intersexual situations are involved, these ometimes override individual attitudes and perceptual habits and give new direction to interpretation of such stimuli as Negro-white social situations where mixing of the sexes is present. The findings point also to the pervasive influence of role categories in influencing the perception of the nature of interaction. The finding that the Negro male was viewed as leading the action by both and unprejudiced subjects is case in point. This finding is interesting from the standpoint of role theory, especially as regards role conflict. In the situation portrayed, the Negro male has two readily apparent, socially significant, but conflicting roles along with their attached statuses: the positively evaluated role of adult male, and the negatively evaluated role of Which of these sets of for others are the most pervasive? According to our findings it would seem that the expectations defining the relationship of man to woman and vice versa, are more pervasive than those defining the relationship of white to Negro. In any case, these relationships are important enough to merit further testing. These findings also have methodological significance for attitude research. In spite of the fact that every definition of prejudice assumes categorical thinking, the present findings demonstrate the fact that categorization is not complete. People, even prejudiced people, do not react to Negroes simply as a Negro, ignoring all other possible characteristics. Rather, other culturally provided, learned orientations enter into the stimulus field that triggers the attitudinal response. This finding is complementary to that of an earlier investigation by one of the authors in which it was established that the occupational status of the Negro was significant determinant of the response of whites to particular Negro.6

Left-Right Orientation in Profile Drawing

In a recent study of handedness and mirror-drawing Ross pointed out that his results were inconclusive because all of his (students at Bucknell University), regardless of handedness, were under the same cultural disposition to write and to read from left to right.1 He expressed the belief that these motor and perceptual habits, impressed upon his by their culture, conditioned his results. He was, therefore, of the opinion that Ss from other cultures who read and write from right to left should be included in the study . . . before final interpretations are justifiable. The cultural effect of left to right reading was also indicated in Malter's study of children's ability to read a process diagram.2 He found that 86% of the children who failed to locate the starting place, started at the upper left-hand of the illustration. This result also suggests that orientation in drawing is related to instruction in reading and writing.