Behavioural asymmetries on the greyscales task: The influence of native reading direction

Friedrich, Trista E.; Elias, Lorin

doi:10.1007/s40167-014-0019-3

Cited by 24 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…The greyscales task (GRE) requires a comparative luminance (“darkness”) judgement to be made between two parallel horizontal lines containing a mirror-imaged linear contrast gradients ( Fig 1c ). The bar in which the dark section is located on the left side of space tends to be perceived as darker overall, compared to when it is placed on the right [ 10 , 36 – 41 ]. Most importantly, the left side is reported darker even when the bars are equiluminant, indicating a perceptual overestimation of the darkness of the left side of the stimulus.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intra- and Inter-Task Reliability of Spatial Attention Measures in Pseudoneglect

et al. 2015

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Healthy young adults display a leftward asymmetry of spatial attention (“pseudoneglect”) that has been measured with a wide range of different tasks. Yet at present there is a lack of systematic evidence that the tasks commonly used in research today are i) stable measures over time and ii) provide similar measures of spatial bias. Fifty right-handed young adults were tested on five tasks (manual line bisection, landmark, greyscales, gratingscales and lateralised visual detection) on two different days. All five tasks were found to be stable measures of bias over the two testing sessions, indicating that each is a reliable measure in itself. Surprisingly, no strongly significant inter-task correlations were found. However, principal component analysis revealed left-right asymmetries to be subdivided in 4 main components, namely asymmetries in size judgements (manual line bisection and landmark), luminance judgements (greyscales), stimulus detection (lateralised visual detection) and judgements of global/local features (manual line bisection and grating scales). The results align with recent research on hemispatial neglect which conceptualises the condition as multi-component rather than a single pathological deficit of spatial attention. We conclude that spatial biases in judgment of visual stimulus features in healthy adults (e.g., pseudoneglect) is also a multi-component phenomenon that may be captured by variations in task demands which engage task-dependent patterns of activation within the attention network.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intra- and Inter-Task Reliability of Spatial Attention Measures in Pseudoneglect

et al. 2015

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“…In one study, both RTL and LTR readers showed a bias to report a darker gradient with the dark edge located to the left (Nicholls & Roberts, 2002). However, in another experiment with a larger sample of subjects, RTL readers showed a weaker leftward bias in comparison to LTR readers (Friedrich & Elias, 2014). Furthermore, comparing viewing behavior over images that have a different direction of illumination, Smith and Elias (2013) reported that LTR readers fixated more to the left side of the images in contrast to RTL readers fixating more to the right.…”

Section: Experiments 1a and B: The Influence Of Reading Direction On Tmentioning

confidence: 91%

The dynamic effect of reading direction habit on spatial asymmetry of image perception

2016

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Exploration of images after stimulus onset is initially biased to the left. Here, we studied the causes of such an asymmetry and investigated effects of reading habits, text primes, and priming by systematically biased eye movements on this spatial bias in visual exploration. Bilinguals first read text primes with right-to-left (RTL) or left-to-right (LTR) reading directions and subsequently explored natural images. In Experiment 1, native RTL speakers showed a leftward free-viewing shift after reading LTR primes but a weaker rightward bias after reading RTL primes. This demonstrates that reading direction dynamically influences the spatial bias. However, native LTR speakers who learned an RTL language late in life showed a leftward bias after reading either LTR or RTL primes, which suggests the role of habit formation in the production of the spatial bias. In Experiment 2, LTR bilinguals showed a slightly enhanced leftward bias after reading LTR text primes in their second language. This might contribute to the differences of native RTL and LTR speakers observed in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, LTR bilinguals read normal (LTR, habitual reading) and mirrored left-to-right (mLTR, nonhabitual reading) texts. We observed a strong leftward bias in both cases, indicating that the bias direction is influenced by habitual reading direction and is not secondary to the actual reading direction. This is confirmed in Experiment 4, in which LTR participants were asked to follow RTL and LTR moving dots in prior image presentation and showed no change in the normal spatial bias. In conclusion, the horizontal bias is a dynamic property and is modulated by habitual reading direction.

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“…This rules out a possibility suggested by a reviewer, that participants could only identify one letter on any one trial, but attended to one side in some trials and the other side in the remaining trials. 65; with stream F(1,23) = .03, p = .86; with both for the three-way interaction F (3,69) = .92, p = .44).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…A smaller study with a related grayscales task (Mattingley et al, 1994) did not find a significant difference between native English readers and readers whose main language was Hebrew, although a consistent trend is evident in the data (Nicholls & Roberts, 2002). A recent study with a larger sample of right-to-left readers found a significant right bias in the right-to-left readers (Friedrich & Elias, 2014). These findings question the usual interpretation of left biases in terms of an intrinsic right-hemisphere advantage (e.g.…”

mentioning

confidence: 80%

Holcombe Nguyen Goodbourn (in press). Implied reading direction and prioritization of letter encoding. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Holcombe¹,

Nguyen²,

Goodbourn³

2016

Preprint

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Capacity limits hinder processing of multiple stimuli, contributing to poorer performance for identifying two briefly presented letters than for identifying a single letter. Higher accuracy is typically found for identifying the letter on the left, which has been attributed to a right-hemisphere dominance for selective attention. Here we use rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of letters in two locations at once. The letters to be identified are simultaneous and cued by rings. In a first experiment, we manipulated implied reading direction by rotating or mirror-reversing the letters to face to the left rather than to the right. The left-side performance advantage was eliminated. In a second experiment, letters were positioned above and below fixation, oriented such that they appeared to face downwards (90° clockwise rotation) or upwards (90° counter-clockwise rotation). Again consistent with an effect of implied reading direction, performance was better for the top position in the downwards condition, but not in the upwards condition. In both experiments, mixture modeling of participants’ report errors revealed that attentional sampling from the two locations was approximately simultaneous, ruling out the theory that the letter on one side was processed first, followed by a shift of attention to sample the other letter. Thus, the orientation of the letters apparently controls not when the letters are sampled from the scene, but rather the dynamics of a subsequent process, such as tokenization or memory consolidation. Implied reading direction appears to determine the letter prioritized at a high-level processing bottleneck.

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Behavioural asymmetries on the greyscales task: The influence of native reading direction

Cited by 24 publications

References 51 publications

Intra- and Inter-Task Reliability of Spatial Attention Measures in Pseudoneglect

Intra- and Inter-Task Reliability of Spatial Attention Measures in Pseudoneglect

The dynamic effect of reading direction habit on spatial asymmetry of image perception

Holcombe Nguyen Goodbourn (in press). Implied reading direction and prioritization of letter encoding. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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