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Psychologists, like digital poets, need to manipulate text for striking visual effects. A surprising font-related result in the field of HEP was recently reported by Miellet et al. who designed a text display that would present the letters in a size that compensated for the reduced visual acuity in peripheral compared to central vision. Given that we can resolve most detail at the point of fixation, and gradually less detail in more peripheral vision, text must be presented in a “butterfly” format. In this format, the directly fixated letter of a given word is printed in normal size, the two adjacent letters are printed in slightly larger size, and more distant letters in ever more increasing sizes.

The authors expected that readers would be able to process more text at any given fixation, thus leading to larger saccades (eye-movements from one point to another) and somewhat faster reading rates. However, they found that neither reading rates nor saccade lengths differed reliably between conditions. This result was taken to suggest that the crucial cognitive limitation in reading is not our limited perceptual acuity but our limited amount of attention which does not allow us to process more than a small number of letters at a time.