Influence of reading habits on line bisection

Pseudoneglect: a review and meta-analysis of performance factors in line bisection tasks

“…Most studies have used mixed sex subject groups [31,48,50,60,79,95,113,120] or failed to report the sex of subjects [4,6,9,11,40,57,95,103,111]. The majority of studies examining the in¯uence of sex report non-signi®cant eects [16,19,30,42,73,86,92,110,115]. However, Roig and Cicero [105] found that males erred more to the 2 While various response criteria have been used to measure bisection performance, this review uses mean signed deviation from veridical center as a response measure since it captures both the direction and amplitude of bisection errors.…”

“…Most studies have limited testing to dextral subjects [19,23,30,31,38,41,42,48,50,60,61,62,79,84,87,91,94,97,111,115,120,126]. Many, however, fail to disclose subject handedness [4,6,11,22,40,57,98,103,113,118].…”

“…Chokron and Imbert [30] investigated the eects of line length on visual line bisection with French and Israeli subjects. French subjects erred to the left of true center while Israeli subjects erred to the right of true center with error size increasing as a function of line length.…”

“…Olson [98] found that scanning initiated from the left side of a line caused greater leftward error than scanning initiated from the right side of a line in a line bisection task. Chokron and Imbert [30] investigated the eect of reading style, a possible determinant of habitual scanning direction, on visual line bisection. French subjects (who read left-to-right) tended to err left while Israeli subjects (who read right-to-left) tended to err right, and report results similar to those of Halligan and Marshall [44] and Chokron and Imbert [29].…”

Paying attention to reading direction

“…First, from a clinical point of view, regardless of written-language direction, specific left-and right-hemispheric lesions produce equivalent neurological and neuropsychological disorders. Second, the effect of reading direction on visuospatial performance can be simulated just by reversing the subject's scanning direction 2 . There is thus mounting evidence of an interaction between reading direction and brain function, and a cultural hypothesis has been proposed 13,14 .…”