Letter Recognition within Words Flashed Left and Right of Fixation

Abstract

Neural activity related to eye movements has been proposed as a reason for superior recognition of words to the right of fixation. Predictions from such propositions were verified in our experiment. The distribution of recognition errors among letter positions on the left is relatively symmetrical, while the distribution on the right increases from fixation.

Visual field and the letter span.

“…742-743). Harcum and Jones (1962) reopened the question of position effects within the letter span by analyzing the locus of errors for letter positions within eight-letter words presented wholly in the left or the right visual field. They reported a bow-shaped error function over letter position for words presented in the left visual field, but a gradually increasing error function for letters the further they were to the right for words in the right visual field.…”

Visual on- and off-latencies and handedness

“…In the recent handedness literature, the study by Goodglass and Barton (1963) compared exposure times needed for the recognition of verbal materials presented in the left and right visual fields, of both the left and right eye, and for left-handed and right-handed Ss, The right visual field was found to require shorter exposures for both groups of Ss, a result that it seems proper to ascribe to the confounding effects of left-to-right reading habits (Harcum & Jones, 1962;Heron, 1957). No other effects were significant.…”

Lateral Asymmetries in Visual Perception: A Review of Tachistoscopic Visual Half-Field Studies

“…To account for these findings Heron suggested that recognition asymmetries were due to a "directional postexposure scanning" mechanism which operated from left-to-right for English words and right-toleft for Yiddish words, thus explaining also the apparent contradiction with the Mishkin and Forgays' data. Heron's work, which was later supported by results from Harcum and Jones (1962) and Bryden (1960), provided evidence that lateral asymmetries resulted from the directional scanning of a rapidly decaying iconic memory of the linguistic stimuli. Processing of the stimulus allegedly began at the left and proceeded towards the right (for English words and numbers).…”