Stimulus orientation and the first-letter advantage

A post-cued partial report target-in-string identification experiment examined the influence of stimulus orientation on the serial position functions for strings of five consonants or five symbols, with an aim to test different accounts of the first-letter advantage observed in prior research. Under one account, this phenomenon is driven by processing that is specific to horizontally arranged letter (and digit) strings. An alternative account explains the first-letter advantage in terms of attentional biases towards the beginning of letter strings. We observed a significant three-way interaction between stimulus type (letters vs. symbols), serial position (1–5), and orientation (horizontal vs. vertical) that was driven by a greater first-position advantage for letters than symbols when stimuli were presented horizontally compared with vertical presentation. These results provide support for the letter-specific processing account of the first-letter advantage, and further suggest that differences in visual complexity between letters and symbols play a minor role. Nevertheless, a first-position advantage for letters was observed in the vertical presentation condition, thus pointing to some role for attentional biases that operate independently of string orientation.