Stimulating, if nothing else: http://www.labspaces.net/101235/Mystery_..._explained

labspaces Wrote:Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, thinks he knows why the golden ratio pops up everywhere: the eyes scan an image the fastest when it is shaped as a golden-ratio rectangle.

The natural design that connects vision and cognition is a theory that flowing systems -- from airways in the lungs to the formation of river deltas -- evolve in time so that they flow more and more easily. Bejan termed this the constructal law in 1996, and its latest application appears early online in the International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics.

"When you look at what so many people have been drawing and building, you see these proportions everywhere," Bejan said. "It is well known that the eyes take in information more efficiently when they scan side-to-side, as opposed to up and down."

Well, it tells me how to split up the page when I write something 縦書き.

wildweathel Wrote:Well, it tells me how to split up the page when I write something 縦書き.

Thanks for reminding me to look into the cogsci of 縦書き. I'd been meaning to follow up on a link I posted at HBPK about mental timelines...

I also read about how eye movement studies of kanji/kana reading revealed a wider FOV or somesuch, shorter fixations, and longer saccades.

Related: http://www.jstor.org/pss/620771

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...6#pid77676 (notes that the horizontal movement exercises only seem to work for strong right-handers)

Looking for a copy of: "Effective visual field size necessary for vertical reading during Japanese text processing" by Naoyuki Osaka

Apparently research shows that the wider visual field (twice as large) of kanji/kana mixed is unaffected by verticality. (Perhaps, half-heartedly speculating with above eye exercise link, related to 'rightward asymmetry' (esp. in fusiform/early visual recognition - HBPK 12 [p. 9+] for starters) of kanji processing vs. kana?