Attitudes shaped by eye movements : : the reading direction effect

Consumers frequently encounter alphanumeric stimuli that move across their fields of vision horizontally. This research examines whether the direction of motion—leftward or rightward—affects processing and evaluations of such stimuli. The findings demonstrate that when stimulus movement direction coincided rather than conflicted with the viewer’s habitual reading direction, evaluations of the stimulus were more positive (study 1). Further, this directional effect was driven by motor fluency rather than conceptual fluency (study 2), and its processes involved activation of reading knowledge (study 3).