The recognition of geometrically transformed text

In two experiments it was found that the difficulty of recognizing geometrically transformed text varied with the transformation imposed upon it. In one experiment the text was in English and the Ss were native speakers of English; in the second, the text was in Hebrew and the Ss were native speakers of Hebrew. The two languages are read in opposite directions. Nevertheless, the order of difficulty of the trans-formations was similar with the two texts. The results are interpreted to show that the visual systems contains “trans-formation operators” as well as the more widely publicized “detectors.”