Optimal Recognition Point (ORP): Does It Help You Read?

The optimal recognition point (ORP) is the letter an RSVP reader highlights in each word, usually a little left of centre, as the place to rest your eyes. The name was coined by the app maker Spritz, but it rests on a real research finding called the optimal viewing position: a single word is recognised fastest when your eye starts near its middle. The effect is genuine but small, it shrinks further in normal reading, and words are recognised perfectly well from other positions. A highlighted letter is a convenient anchor, not a source of extra speed.

Where the idea comes from: optimal viewing position and preferred viewing location

Two research findings, published from 1979 onwards, sit behind the ORP. They are easy to confuse because both are about where in a word the eye should be.

Optimal viewing position (OVP)

In laboratory experiments, a word is flashed on a screen so that the reader's eye is fixed on a chosen letter when it appears. O'Regan, Lévy-Schoen, Pynte and Brugaillère (1984) showed that some positions in a word work better than others. O'Regan and Jacobs (1992) then measured it with words of 4 to 11 letters: the time needed to name a word, or to decide whether it was a real word, was shortest when the eye started near the middle or slightly left of it, and grew by about 20 milliseconds for each letter of distance from that point. The effect appeared even in short words.

Preferred viewing location (PVL)

Keith Rayner (1979) looked at the other side of the question: where do readers' eyes actually land in ordinary text? He found that the first fixation on a word tends to fall between its beginning and its middle. He called this the preferred viewing location. It reflects how the eyes aim at a word seen in the corner of the eye, and it lies close to, but slightly before, the optimal viewing position.

How do RSVP apps use the ORP?

In an RSVP reader the words come to you one at a time in the same place, so your eyes do not travel along a line. Spritz, which brought this format to phones in 2014, described the ORP as the point the eye seeks in each word before processing it for meaning. Its display aligned every word on that letter and highlighted it in red, so that each word arrived with its ORP exactly where you were already looking. Many apps copied the idea, often with a coloured pivot letter and small marks above and below it.

The argument is that this saves the eye from having to find the right spot in each new word. For background on the format itself, see what is RSVP reading?

How much does the optimal recognition point matter?

Less than app marketing suggests. Four findings put it in proportion:

1. The effect is measured on isolated words.The roughly 20 milliseconds per letter in O'Regan and Jacobs (1992) comes from single words flashed with the eye held on a set letter. The 2016 review by Rayner and colleagues describes the OVP effect as small and consistently found for single words, and adds that it is even smaller in natural reading.
2. You recognise words from other positions. The same review stresses that looking elsewhere in a word slows recognition slightly; it does not prevent it.
3. Reading reverses the pattern.When Vitu, McConkie, Kerr and O'Regan (2001) analysed large sets of eye-movement recordings, fixations at the centre of words were the longest, not the shortest. Researchers call this the inverted optimal viewing position effect. In real reading you begin processing the next word before you look at it, which reduces the importance of where exactly you land.
4. Centring the word gets you most of the way. Rayner and colleagues note that aligning words at the OVP may be an improvement over RSVP that left-aligns words, but that simply centring each word keeps the eye close to the OVP anyway.

The ORP addresses a delay measured in milliseconds per word, and only for the first moment of recognising it. Reading speed is limited by understanding sentences, so a highlighted letter can make RSVP more comfortable but cannot make it much faster.

That fits the broader evidence on RSVP. When Benedetto and colleagues (2015) tested a Spritz-style reader against normal reading at about average speed, readers did as well on inference questions, worse on literal details, and reported more visual fatigue. The pivot letter did not remove the costs of losing regressions and preview.

What Tachi's Flash mode does with the pivot letter

Tachi's reader takes the second approach Rayner and colleagues describe: it centres each chunk and adds a coloured pivot letter as a visual cue. Precisely:

• Only single words are coloured.With a chunk size of one word, Flash mode colours one letter in the reader theme's accent colour. With two or more words per chunk, no letter is coloured, since one pivot per word would split your attention.
• The letter depends on word length. A one-letter word has its only letter coloured; words of 2 to 5 letters get the 2nd letter; 6 to 9 letters, the 3rd; 10 to 13 letters, the 4th; 14 or more, the 5th. Letters are counted as the user sees them, so accented characters count once.
• The word is centred, not aligned on the pivot. Each word sits in the middle of the screen between two small fixation marks, one above and one below. The marks point at the centre of the word, and the coloured letter sits a little to the left of that and shifts slightly from word to word. Apps in the Spritz style do the opposite: they fix the pivot in place and let the word shift around it.
• Other modes. Fade mode shows the same coloured letter, with faint previews of the previous and next chunk. Bionic and Wide modes do not colour a pivot; the full-text Highlight and Pacer modes mark the whole current chunk instead.

The full list of settings is in how Tachi works, and the related terms are defined in the glossary. If you prefer the classic look of a red letter on white, choose the Paper theme.

How to practise: find out whether the pivot helps you

Because the research effect is small, your own comfort is the best guide. A simple test:

1. Pick an article of about 1,500 words on a familiar topic and split it into three parts.
2. Set Flash mode, one word per chunk and 250 WPM, or 25 WPM below your normal rate if you know it.
3. Read the first part with your eyes on the coloured letter, the second with your eyes on the fixation marks, and the third in Bionic mode, which has no pivot.
4. After each part, look away and write down three main points from memory. Note which part felt least tiring.
5. Keep the setting that gave you the best recall with the least strain, and use it for two weeks of 10-minute sessions before raising the speed by 25 WPM.

If your eyes feel strained or dry, take breaks and blink normally. Reading software does not treat vision problems; persistent discomfort is a reason to see an optometrist. For how the eyes move in normal reading, see eye movements in reading, and for a comparison of pivot letters with bolded word starts, see RSVP vs bionic reading.