In this case, almost certainly left-to-right consistency.  But depending on the diagram, sometimes you do care more about the Y axis than the X axis; I wouldn&#x27;t say I have a consistent reading order between the two, though generally I&#x27;ll look at the diagram caption first.<p>For the graphed data itself, I suspect people do tend to pay more attention to the Y axis, and more specifically to the extremes; the results in most papers tend to talk about those extremes (with the exception of the rare graph that highlights consistency across a range of results).  Given that, it makes sense to check the scale for &quot;how high&quot; or &quot;how low&quot; first, and then check &quot;by varying what&quot;.