Pseudoneglect in solid-line versus character-line bisection tasks: a test for attention dominance theory.
OBJECTIVE
Normal subjects tend to bisect lines slightly to the left of the true midpoint, a phenomenon termed pseudoneglect. To test whether pseudoneglect relates to the right hemisphere's dominance for spatial attention or to the hemispheric difference in processing global-local stimulus properties, we administered conventional solid-line (SBT) and novel character-line (CBT) bisection tasks to normal subjects of different ages.


METHODS
Normal subjects, consisting of 40 young and 40 older individuals, received 3 experimental tasks, a standard SBT and 2 types of CBT. Each subject completed 10 consecutive trials of each task presented in counterbalanced order between subjects.


RESULTS
Across age groups, deviations on CBT were further to the right than those of SBT, and the leftward bias (pseudoneglect) was significant only in SBT.


CONCLUSIONS
These results indicate that the bisection errors in normal subjects depend on the characteristics demanded by the specific task. Thus, our findings argue against the attention dominance theory and support a "task specificity" theory for pseudoneglect.
Lee
Byung Hwa
BH
Department of Neurology, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Korea.
Kim
Minjee
M
Kang
Sue J
SJ
Park
Key Chung
KC
Kim
Eun-Joo
EJ
Adair
John C
JC
Na
Duk L
DL
D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes; D008875:Middle Aged; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010468:Perceptual Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D013028:Space Perception; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis