Abstract: To investigate. the role and mechanism of mental rotation in recognizing rotatedChinese characters, the recognition processes of both rotated Chinese characters andtexts by means of eye--movement experiments were studied. The results demonstratedthat recognition bine and number of fixations required tO recognize rotated Chinesecharacter linearly increased with their angular deviation to upright direction. Theseeye--movement data indicated that the mental rotation process existed in recognition ofrotated Chinese. The comparison of results from text reading experiments, in whichfour modes of characters rotating were adopted, showed that both image and framerotation were operated in the processing of mental rotation.

Key words: eye movements, mental rotation, Chinese recognition, pattern recognition