Row-Blindness

One day Jim Lewis looked at this figure.

We told him he should see rows. He said he didn't. We ignored him.

The X's and O's should be evenly spaced. You can redraw them if they are not. You should not tilt your head to the right or left when you look at this. If you see someone significantly tilting their head, they are row-blind.)

While we talked, Jim studied the figure. He rotated it 90 degrees to this.

Jim announced he could now see columns. That got my attention. I am a cognitive psychologist. The rows are produced by a principle of Gestalt grouping, called similarity. Jim had a deficit we now call row blindness. By everything I knew, THIS DEFICIT SHOULD NOT EXIST.

Things might have stopped there. But I had an assistant with some strange visual processing difficulties, including an early reading deficit. SHE COULD NOT SEE ROWS EITHER. So now we had found a deficit that not only shouldn't exist but also seemed to be common.

Jim arduously found and tested college dyslexics. To our surprise, half of the dyslexics were row-blind. I arduously wrote this up. It was published in a major journal. You can read our abstract here.

This is not mainstream research. You can think of us as out of step. It is more like we are on our own planet.

Teaching Row-Blind Dyslexics to Read

If someone is row-blind, they have potential trouble reading. This is because letters are presented in rows, and you have to group the letters in a row. If they are not column-blind, and most aren't, and if English was written up-down instead of right-to-left, they presumably would have no problem.

You cannot retype every book. But you can rotate a book so that the letters are up-down. In fact, we found that most row-blind people can start to group at about a 45 degree angle.

So the easy solution is simply to rotate the page to about a 45 degree angle. At first, this is unfamiliar, so it will be slower. But anyone could get used to reading at this angle, and it should help a row-blind dyslexic a lot.

Is this really true? We think so. It would be nice to do an experiment demonstrating this, but neither Jim or I are in a position to do an experiment now. And if was ignored as much as this finding has been, why should we bother. But pay attention:

• Almost all of our row-blind subjects read at an angle. Normal readers usually do not read at an angle.
• When we found a row-blind subject who did not have reading difficulties, he/she often had family members who were dyslexic. Our subject avoided the bullet but his/her siblings did not.
• One dyslexic I found through the internet said tilting the page worked for him. He read the tilting-the-page trick in a newspaper article! (I could not find the article.) (His email)

The bottom line is this. Apparently, some people are row-blind. At least sometimes it is a heriditary deficit. Some people with row-blindness become normal readers, even though other family members might not. How do they do this? Apparently, tilting the page is one method of avoiding the problem of row-blindness.

What Should You Do?

• If you know or meet a dyslexic, you should test him or her for row-blindness. Just drawing X's and O's on a piece of paper seems to work fine. Rotate your drawing to test for column-blindness.
• Row-blind people can beat our test for row-blindness by tilting their head. For at least some row blind people, rapid movements also help. If someone tilts the page when they read, or if they move their head around like a bird, they are probably row-blind.
• Encourage a row-blind dyslexic to tilt his/her book. NEVER straighten a dyslexic's book.
• The row-blind dyslexic can use our test to discover what angle he/she needs to group the letters by similarity, then start practicing reading at that angle.
• Or he/she can just rotate the page as much as is comfortable and slowly progress to larger and larger angles.
• When this helps, email me and I will put you on my webpage. Then more people will pay attention and more people can be helped.