title: Time course of pseudoneglect in scene viewing.
abstract: When we view the visual world, our eyes move from one location to another about three times each second. When looking at pictures of natural scenes, neurologically intact individuals show a leftward bias in the direction of their first eye movement. The present study investigates the time course of this pseudoneglect and how it depends on task-related control. Eye movements were recorded from 72 participants, each viewing 135 scenes under three different viewing instructions (memorization, esthetic preference judgment, object-in-scene search). In the memorization and preference tasks, pseudoneglect had a maximum extent of about 1° and lasted for about 1500 msec, or 5 fixations. The effect was somewhat reduced in the preference task, which gave subjects free reign to fixate anywhere they wanted to. During scene search, a task that is guided primarily by top-down control, observers also showed a distinct pseudoneglect. Strikingly, a leftward bias was present even when the search object was located in the right hemispace. Search performance was not affected by the observed spatial asymmetries. The effects likely arise from a right-hemisphere dominance for visuo-spatial attention.
authors.affiliation: University of Edinburgh, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Psychology Department, Edinburgh, UK; Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld University, Germany. Electronic address: Antje.Nuthmann@ed.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Antje
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nuthmann
authors.affiliation: University of Ulm, Department of Psychology and Pedagogy, Ulm, Germany.
authors.forename: Ellen
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Matthias
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attention; Eye movements; Hemispheric asymmetry; Pseudoneglect; Scene perception