Stanislas Dehaene

When foveal information is lacking, whether due to a retinal lesion, to a stroke having destroyed the central part of the visual cortex, or to an experimental trick

Arabic or Hebrew, where gaze scans the page from right to left, this asymmetry is reversed.12 In other writing systems such as Chinese, where character density is greater, saccades are shorter and visual span is reduced accordingly. Each reader thus adapts his visual exploration strategy to his language and script

we can immediately recognize the identity of “words,” “WORDS,” and “WoRdS,” it is because our visual system pays no attention to the contours of words or to the pattern of ascending and descending letters: