Cerebral Laterality for Famous Proper Nouns: Visual Recognition by Normal Subjects

Personally Familiar Proper Names Are Relatively Successfully Processed in the Human Right Hemisphere; or, the Missing Link

“…While the alteration of so many critical experimental parameters largely obviated any analogy between Schweinburger et al (2001) and our published article (Ohnesorge & Van Lancker, 2001), the attentional control included in their design was an interesting feature which bore further investigation. We conducted a repeat assay of Experiment Six from Ohnesorge and Van Lancker (2001) with the addition of competition stimuli like those used by Schweinburger et al (2001).…”

“…In one example, if people had sooner published their data contradictory to the popular notion that a right hemisphere is specialized for a putative affective component of language, we might have been spared many years of unfortunate bandwagon effect. In the current case, Schweinberger et al (2001) based their refutation on our previous presentation at the Academy of Aphasia, which appeared as an abstract (Ohnesorge & Van Lancker, 1999); the complete article (Ohnesorge & Van Lancker, 2001) appeared after submission of their article to Brain and Language, so that in their refutation, our colleagues from Scotland and Germany did not have the benefit of the larger view or knowledge of the broader range of methods and stimuli we used to obtain our results. Their article describes two experiments, the second of which utilizes proper noun stimuli.…”

“…The value of utilizing stimuli identified as familiar by the subjects themselves was demonstrated by one of the analyses in the Ohnesorge and Van Lancker (2001) study. This occurred in Experiment Four, in which a significant effect was seen only when familiarity ratings on the proper names were obtained and subjects' performance results were reanalyzed using only stimuli in the top 70% of familiarity (leading to two analyses, 4a and 4b).…”

“…Another source of evidence that degree of familiarity is an important ingredient to consider in probing RH proper nouns ability comes from task differences utilized in Ohnesorge and Van Lancker (2001). In Experiments Two and Three, processing in the RH was less apparent when subjects responded by identifying the stimuli as animate or inanimate (common nouns), male or female (famous proper nouns), than in Experiment 1, when (using the same stimuli) the response categories ''famous proper nouns'' versus ''common nouns'' were used.…”

“…To examine the possibility that use of visual masking on the nonpresentation side of the visual half field might have influenced the results, and to replicate the longer presentation times, we performed two experiments comparing recognition of locally obtained famous proper nouns and unknown proper nouns (those of Experiment Five and Six in Ohnesorge & Van Lancker, 2001). While the alteration of so many critical experimental parameters largely obviated any analogy between Schweinburger et al (2001) and our published article (Ohnesorge & Van Lancker, 2001), the attentional control included in their design was an interesting feature which bore further investigation. We conducted a repeat assay of Experiment Six from Ohnesorge and Van Lancker (2001) with the addition of competition stimuli like those used by Schweinburger et al (2001).…”