Hemispheric differences in serial versus parallel processing.

Abstract

Three experiments examined hemispheric differences in reaction time (RT) to judge a set of items same (all identical) or different (one item differing from the rest), as a function of number of items in the set. When the items were letters, the left hemisphere yielded RTs increasing with the number of letters in the set, as in serial processing; the right hemisphere showed no increase of RT for larger numbers of letters, as in parallel or holistic processing. When the items were unnameable shapes, both hemispheres appeared to process in parallel. Thus, a serial vs. parallel processing difference between left and right hemispheres appears to be limited to linguistic material which can be analyzed either verbally or visuospatially. If verbal analysis forces a. serial procedure, while visuospatial analysis permits parallel processing, then the results can be explained in terms of the lateralization of these modes of analysis.

Different stages of <I>Kanji</I> processing and their relations to functional hemisphere asymmetries

“…Because the Kanjis are nonphonetic logographic symbols, those are perceived in word apprehension as a single unit rather than a sequence of letters in the case of Alphabet words. It is known that the right hemisphere favoured this type of processing (Cohen, 1973;Patterson & Bradshaw, 1975). The more ideal property of the Kanji for the right hemisphere processing might attenuate the left hemisphere superiority for lexical decision tasks.…”

Neuropsychological approaches to bilingualism: A critical review.

“…The cerebral hemispheres, in this view, are presumed to differ not so much in the type of stimuli that they process, but in their manner of processing any stimulus (Tomlinson-Keasey & Kelly, 1979). The left hemisphere is thought to process information analytically and serially, while the right hemisphere is believed to process information in a gestalt, simultaneous manner (Cohen, 1973;LevyAgresti & Sperry, 1968). To the extent that language functions vary in their reliance on serial vesus simultaneous modes of information processing, one would expect differential hemispheric involvement in the processing of different linguistic skills.…”

Cerebral asymmetry in time perception

“…There is evidence that the left hemisphere processes stimuli linearly and analytically in a linguistic mode, while the right hemisphere processes stimuli holistically and synthetically in an imaginal mode (Bever & Chiarello, 1974;Cohen, 1973;Gordon, 1975;Robinson & Solomon, 1974;Seamon, 1974 …”