Spatial Representation of Action Phrases Among Bidirectional Readers

Abstract

Perceptual bias in simple visuospatial tasks, such as line bisection seen among healthy dextrals, has often been attributed to the hemispheric activation hypothesis. The often reported leftward perceptual bias was explained by an activation of the right hemisphere during visuospatial tasks. However, imposed scanning direction and stimuli saliency have also been used to explain these spatial asymmetries. One example of scanning direction is the well-trained one resulting from reading direction. Here, we present studies that target the role of reading direction on nonverbal tasks: line bisection, esthetic preference, and straight-ahead pointing by comparing left-to-right and right-to-left readers. The findings are discussed regarding the interaction between cultural factors, such as reading habits, and biological factors, such as cerebral lateralization.

Script Directionality Affects Depiction of Depth in Representational Drawings

“…Dobel, Diesendruck, and Bolte (2007) reported that differences in spatial biases in agent placement on a sentence illustration task were found in adult but not in preschool users of Hebrew vs. German tested respectively in Israel and Germany. Kazandjian, Zivotofsky, and Chokron (2010) found differences between French and Hebrew readers, and Vaid, Rhodes, and Tosun (2011) found differences in English vs. Arabic readers (see also Altmann, Saleem, Kendall, Heilman, & Gonzales Rothi, 2006). Similarly, on a task involving sentence construction using two pictures (one presented on the left and the other on the right), Chan and Bergen (2005) found that the picture on the left was selected as the agent most often by English and Chinese participants but the picture on the right was selected as the agent by Taiwanese participants more often.…”

Electrophysiological hallmarks for event relations and event roles in working memory

“…Although little is known thus far about how event roles are neurally encoded, one possibility that we explored in this study is that event roles are represented as a kind of "magnitude". 6 Behaviorally, agent-patient event roles have sometimes been observed to interact with spatial position (i.e., left-right), which can be treated as a "magnitude" (e.g., Chatterjee et al, 1995;Maass and Russo, 2003;Dobel et al, 2007a; but see Geminiani et al, 1995;Barrett et al, 2002;Altmann et al, 2006;Kazandjian et al, 2011;Dobel et al, 2014 for conflicting results). Some authors have proposed that regions of parietal cortex represent diverse kinds of scalar and quantity information in a common neural implementation format (Walsh, 2003;Bueti and Walsh, 2009;Summerfield et al, 2020; for a critical review see .…”

Electrophysiological hallmarks for event relations and event roles in working memory

“…Although little is known thus far about how event roles are neurally encoded, one possibility that we explored in this study is that event roles are represented as a kind of “magnitude”. 6 Behaviorally, agent-patient event roles have sometimes been observed to interact with spatial position (i.e., left-right), which can be treated as a “magnitude” (e.g., Chatterjee et al, 1995 ; Maass and Russo, 2003 ; Dobel et al, 2007a ; but see Geminiani et al, 1995 ; Barrett et al, 2002 ; Altmann et al, 2006 ; Kazandjian et al, 2011 ; Dobel et al, 2014 for conflicting results). Some authors have proposed that regions of parietal cortex represent diverse kinds of scalar and quantity information in a common neural implementation format ( Walsh, 2003 ; Bueti and Walsh, 2009 ; Summerfield et al, 2020 ; for a critical review see Martin et al, 2017 ).…”