A validated set of tool pictures with matched objects and non-objects for laterality research

Abstract

Neuropsychological and neuroimaging research has established that knowledge related to tool use and tool recognition is lateralized to the left cerebral hemisphere. Recently, behavioural studies with the visual half-field technique have confirmed the lateralization. A limitation of this research was that different sets of stimuli had to be used for the comparison of tools to other objects and objects to non-objects. Therefore, we developed a new set of stimuli containing matched triplets of tools, other objects and non-objects. With the new stimulus set, we successfully replicated the findings of no visual field advantage for objects in an object recognition task combined with a significant right visual field advantage for tools in a tool recognition task. The set of stimuli is available as supplemental data to this article

Sinistrals are rarely “right”: evidence from tool-affordance processing in visual half-field paradigms

“…In fact, nearly all studies on tasks involving tools in typical (usually right-handed) individuals point to the left hemisphere as the seat of their representations (including their concepts and the relevant manual skills). It is also worth mentioning that our finding of no visual field asymmetry in the accuracy or speed of categorization for non-tools is furthermore in line with numerous neuroimaging and behavioral studies, too (e.g., Biederman and Cooper, 1991 ; Proverbio et al, 2011 ; Verma and Brysbaert, 2015 ). These reports clearly indicate that the representations (or perhaps the mechanisms involved in categorization and/or recognition) of non-manipulable objects are organized more bilaterally.…”

Cross-modal working memory binding and L1-L2 word learning

“…The 24 new Spoken Mandarin words (see Appendix A for a list of words) were also adopted from Lan et al (2015). The 24 new picture items (12 real and 12 novel) were drawn from the study of Verma and Brysbaert (2015) (see Appendix B for a list of pictures). Finally, the additional 12 target pairs were included to minimize the possibility that participants would base their responses on how they had responded to similar items that had been presented earlier in the test (Bayley, Wixted, Hopkins, & Squire, 2008;Holdstock et al, 2002).…”

“…The spoken words were recorded by a female native Chinese speaker (see Lan et al 2015 for details). The familiar and novel objects consisted of line-drawing pictures taken from Verma and Brysbaert (2015) (see Appendix B for a list of the pictures used). The familiar objects and novel objects were learned in separate blocks.…”

The successor representation subserves hierarchical abstraction for goal-directed behavior

“…The first image is the goal cue (i). In this example, the participant begins the miniblock in a room with a cactus painting (center; images from ref (112) but illustrations shown here were sourced from openclipart.org), and the goal cue indicates that they must look for the "lamp" painting (top). The participant initiates the miniblock by pressing <space> (ii) (This "start state", which the estimated response-coded logistic regressions where key <z> is coded as "0" and key <m> is coded as "1".…”