That seems like a very interesting and useful application of theories in pre-attentive processing. When everything is aligned to the same orientation then the attribute of orientation may become almost effortless to perceive and cognitive resources can be devoted to more targeted feature recognition. There is a section of chapter 5 in the book "Information Visualization: Perception for Design" by Colin Ware [1] called "preattentive processing and ease of search" that goes into nice detail on considerations such as this. (See also [2])
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Information-Visualization-Third-Inter...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-attentive_processing