Selective Attention and Cerebral Dominance in Perceiving and Responding to Speech Messages

1968 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Treisman ◽  
Gina Geffen

The effect of attention on cerebral dominance and the asymmetry between left and right ears was investigated using a selective listening task. Right handed subjects were presented with simultaneous dichotic speech messages; they shadowed one message in either the right or left ear and at the same time tapped with either the right or the left hand when they heard a specified target word in either message. The ear asymmetry was shown only when subjects' attention was focused on some other aspect of the task: they tapped to more targets in the right ear, but only when these came in the non-shadowed message; they made more shadowing errors with the left ear message, but chiefly for non-target words. The verbal response of shadowing showed the right ear dominance more clearly than the manual response of tapping. Tapping with the left hand interfered more with shadowing than tapping with the right hand, but there was little correlation between the degree of hand and of ear asymmetry over individual subjects. The results support the idea that the right ear dominance is primarily a quantitative difference in the distribution of attention to left and right ear inputs reaching the left hemisphere speech areas. This affects both the efficiency of speech perception and the degree of response competition between simultaneous verbal and manual responses.

1977 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon M. Redding ◽  
Deborah A. Gerjets

Two groups of 12 volunteers manually (button pushing) or verbally identified the ink color of 5, randomly ordered and tachistoscopically presented, kinds of stimulus conditions, specified by the nature of the noncolor information and the relationship between color and noncolor information: Congruent Color Words, Noncolor Words, Scrambled Color Words, Nonword Geometric Shapes, and Noncongruent Color Words. With verbal response, facilitation of reaction time occurred for Congruent Color Words compared to Scrambled Color Words and Noncolor Words but not when compared to the Nonword Control, while with manual response facilitation appeared for all comparisons. Interference appeared for both groups, with Noncongruent Color Words having the slowest reaction time. The present design corrected for inadequacies in previous studies and more firmly established the conclusion of parallel perceptual processing of color and noncolor information, with facilitation/interference effects being localized in postperceptual decision operations of signal summation and response competition.


1988 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 555-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Ann Valentino ◽  
James W. Brown ◽  
W. A. Cronan-Hillix

Aesthetic preferences for photographs with the main focal content either to the left or right of the photograph's center were examined in right- and left-handed subjects. Verbal responses or manual responses were required. In one experiment with 261 introductory psychology student-subjects, left-handers more often preferred photographs with the more important part on the left (“left-geared”) than did right-handers. Exp. 2, involving 84 right-handed student subjects, showed that left-geared photographs presented on the left side were preferred more often than left-geared photographs presented on the right side, and left-geared photographs presented on the left side were more often chosen when a left-handed manual response was required. Interactions between handedness, position of the stimulus, language hemisphere, and response mode make it extremely difficult to ascertain whether the right hemisphere is really more involved in aesthetic decisions.


1979 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 867-870
Author(s):  
Allan L. Combs ◽  
Dana A. Beezley ◽  
Gary M. Prater ◽  
Gerald F. Henning ◽  
Rhonda F. Cottrell

Among a group of 12 persons selected for the ability to write with ease with either hand, none were found to write using a hooked hand posture with either the right or left hand. Tests of verbal and manipulospatial ability indicated a normal balance of these two types of abilities, usually associated with the left and right hemispheres. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for cerebral organization and hand position in writing.


1986 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gloria L. Calhoun ◽  
William P. Janson ◽  
Christopher J. Arbak

Eye-controlled switching has been proposed as a biocybernetic control approach which may increase system effectiveness while reducing pilot workload. In this experiment, six subjects selected discrete switches on the front panel of a cockpit simulator while manually tracking a target. In two eye-controlled methods, the subjects directed their gaze at the switch indicated by an auditory cue and then made a consent input (either a manual response or a verbal response). In a conventional manual condition, subjects selected the switches with their left hand. The analysis of mean switching time suggests that eye control is a feasible alternative when hands-off control is desired. Tracking performance was found to differ significantly among switching conditions, indicating the importance of quantifying the efficiency of candidate control methods in visual workload environments analogous to that of the application environment.


1995 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Weeks ◽  
Robert W. Proctor ◽  
Brad Beyak

It has previously been shown that, when stimuli positioned above or below a central fixation point (“up” and “down” stimuli) are assigned to left and right responses, the stimulus–response mapping up-left/down-right is more compatible than the mapping up-right/down-left for responses executed by the left hand in the left hemispace, but this relation is reversed for responses executed by the right hand in the right hemispace. In Experiment 1, each hand responded at locations in both hemispaces to dissociate the influence of hand identity from response location, and response location was found to be the determinant of relative compatibility. In Experiment 2 responses were made at the sagittal midline, and an inactive response switch was placed to the left or right to induce coding of the active switch as right or left, respectively. This manipulation of relative location had an effect similar to, although of lesser magnitude than, that produced by physically changing location of the response switch in Experiment 1. It is argued that these results are counter to predictions of a movement-preference account and consistent with the view that spatial coding underlies compatibility effects for orthogonally oriented stimulus and response sets.


2014 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 408-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abraham N. Safer ◽  
Peter Homel ◽  
David D. Chung

ABSTRACT Objective:  To assess lateral differences between ossification events and stages of bone development in the hands and wrists utilizing Fishman's skeletal maturation indicators (SMIs). Materials and Methods:  The skeletal ages of 125 subjects, aged 8 to 20 years, were determined with left and right hand-wrist radiographs using Fishman's SMI assessment. Each subject was also given the Edinburgh Handedness Questionnaire to assess handedness. The skeletal ages of both hand-wrist radiographs were analyzed against each other, handedness, chronologic age, and gender. Results:  There were no significant differences overall in right and left SMI scores (P  =  .70); 79% of all patients showed no difference in right and left SMI scores, regardless of handedness, gender, or age. However, when patients were categorized based on clinical levels of SMI score for the right hand-wrist, there was a significant difference (P  =  .01) between the SMI 1-3 group and the SMI 11 group. Subjects in the SMI 1-3 group were more likely to show a left > right SMI score, while subjects in the SMI 11 group were likely to show a right > left SMI score. Conclusion:  Although no significant overall lateral differences in SMI scores were noted, it may be advisable to obtain a left hand-wrist radiograph and/or additional diagnostic information to estimate completion of growth in young surgical patients.


Author(s):  
Sherma Zacharias ◽  
Andrew Kirk

ABSTRACT:Background:Constructional impairment following left vs. right hemisphere damage has been extensively studied using drawing tasks. A confounding factor in these studies is that right-handed patients with left hemisphere damage (LHD) are often forced by weakness to use their non-dominant (left) hand or hemiparetic dominant hand. Qualitative differences in the drawing characteristics of left and right hand drawings by normal subjects have not previously been characterized. The present study was undertaken to determine the qualitative differences between left and right hand drawings of normal subjects.Methods:Thirty right-handed, elderly subjects without a history of neurological disease were asked to draw, from memory, seven objects using the right and left hand. Half of the subjects were randomly assigned to draw with the left hand first, and half the right hand first. Right and left hand drawings were compared using a standardized scoring system utilized in several previous studies of drawing in focal and diffuse neurological disease. Each drawing was scored on eighteen criteria. Right and left hand drawing scores were then compared using the t-test for paired samples or the Wilcoxon matched-pairs testResults:Drawings made using the left hand were found to be significantly simpler, more tremulous and of poorer overall quality than drawings made by the same subjects using the right hand.Conclusions:The deficits found in left versus right hand drawings of normals are similar to those found in patients with LHD, suggesting that much of the drawing impairment seen following LHD is due to an elementary motor disturbance related to use of the non-dominant hand.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anant Shinde ◽  
Karl Lerud ◽  
Fanny Munsch ◽  
David C Alsop ◽  
Gottfried Schlaug

AbstractWe used three dose levels (Sham, 2mA and 4mA) and two different electrode montages (unihemispheric or bihemispheric) to examine DOSE and MONTAGE effects on regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) as a surrogate marker of neural activity, and on a finger sequence task, as a surrogate behavioral measure drawing on brain regions targeted by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). We placed the anodal electrode over the right motor region (C4) while the cathodal or return electrode was placed either over a left supraorbital region (unihemispheric montage) or over the left motor region (C3 in the bihemispheric montage). Performance changes in the finger sequence task for both hands (left hand: p = 0.0026, and right hand: p = 0.0002) showed a linear tDCS dose response, but no effect of montage. rCBF in the the right hemispheric perirolandic area increased with dose under the anodal electrode (p = 0.027), while in the perirolandic ROI in the left hemisphere, rCBF showed a trend to increase with dose (p = 0.053), and significant effect of montage (p = 0.00004). The bihemispheric montage showed additional rCBF increases in frontomesial regions in the 4mA condition but not in the 2mA condition. Furthermore, we found correlations between rCBF changes in the right perirolandic region and improvements in the finger sequence task performance (FSP) for left and right hand. Our data support not only a strong direct tDCS dose effect for rCBF and FSP as surrogate measures of targeted brain regions, but also indirect effects on rCBF in functionally connected regions (e.g., frontomesial regions), particularly in the higher dose condition, and on FSP of the ipsilateral hand (to the anodal electrode). At higher dose and irrespective of polarity, a wider network of sensorimotor regions is positively affected by tDCS.Graphical AbstractHighlightstDCS-DOSE had linear effect on finger sequence performance for both handsrCBF changes in both perirolandic ROIs demonstrated tDCS-DOSE effects and left perirolandic ROI demonstrated tDCS-MONTAGE effects.Simulated current intensity in the left and right perirolandic ROI strongly correlated with the contralateral hand’s finger sequence performance.tDCS-Tolerability scores did not correlate with change in rCBF or finger sequence performance of the left hand.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gonca Gokce Menekse Dalveren ◽  
Nergiz Ercil Cagiltay

Eye movements provide very critical information about the cognitive load and behaviors of human beings. Earlier studies report that under normal conditions, the left- and right-eye pupil sizes are equal. For this reason, most studies undertaking eye-movement analysis are conducted by only considering the pupil size of a single eye or taking the average size of both eye pupils. This study attempts to offer a better understanding concerning whether there are any differences between the left- and right-eye pupil sizes of the right-handed surgical residents while performing surgical tasks in a computer-based simulation environment under different conditions (left hand, right hand and both hands). According to the results, in many cases, the right-eye pupil sizes of the participants were larger than their left-eye pupil sizes while performing the tasks under right-hand and both-hands conditions. However, no significant difference was found in relation to the tasks performed under left-hand condition in all scenarios. These results are very critical to shed further light on the cognitive load of the surgical residents by analyzing their left-eye and right-eye pupil sizes. Further research is required to investigate the effect of the difficulty level of each scenario, its appropriateness with the skill level of the participants, and handedness on the differences between the left- and right-eye pupil sizes.


1994 ◽  
Vol 78 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1315-1322 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. David Crews ◽  
David W. Harrison

The influence of depression on the cerebral hemispheric motor functioning of 40 right-handed women, half of whom had been classified as depressed, the other half as nondepressed, was examined. The depressed women were also characterized by elevated state and trait anxiety, suggestive of an anxious-depressive state with heightened arousal. A hand dynamometer was used as a standardized measure of hemispheric motor functioning such as hand-grip strength, perseveration, and fatigue. Primary findings indicated that depressed women displayed significantly less perseveration at the left hand than did nondepressed women, but a nonsignificant trend only was noted for less perseveration at the right hand. These results suggest possible differential arousal of the left and right cerebral hemispheres in this sample of anxious-depressed women and are discussed in terms of arousal theory.


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