title: Reading direction shifts visuospatial attention: an Interactive Account of attentional biases.
abstract: A growing amount of evidence confirms the influence of reading and writing habits on visuospatial processing, although this phenomenon has been so far testified mainly as a lateralized shift of a single behavioral sign (e.g., line bisection), with lack of proof from pure right-to-left readers. The present study contributed to this issue by analyzing multiple attentional and motor indexes in monolingual Italian (i.e., reading from left-to-right), and monolingual (i.e., reading from right-to-left) and bilingual Israeli (i.e., reading from right-to-left in Hebrew but also from left-to-right in English) participants' visuospatial performance. Subjects were administered a computerized standard star cancellation task and a modified version in which English letters and words were replaced by Hebrew ones. Tasks were presented on a graphics tablet, allowing recording of both chronometric and spatial parameters (i.e., measured in (x, y) vector coordinates). Results showed that reading direction modulated the on-line visuomotor performance (i.e., left-to-right vs. right-to-left shifts) from the beginning (i.e., first mark) to the end of the task (i.e., spatial distribution of omissions and subjective epicenter). Additionally, the spatial bias observed in a computerized line bisection task was also related to the participants' habitual reading direction. Overall, the results favor the proposal of an Interactive Account of visuospatial asymmetries, according to which both cultural factors, such as the directional scanning associated with language processing, and biological factors, such as hemispheric specialization, modulate visuospatial processing. Results are discussed in light of recent behavioral and neuroanatomical findings.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy. Electronic address: l.rinaldi2@campus.unimib.it.
authors: Luca
authors: L
authors: Rinaldi
authors: Centre de Neuroscience Système et Cognition, Institut de Recherche en Sciences Psychologiques, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
authors: Samuel
authors: S
authors: Di Luca
authors: Department of Psychology and Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
authors: Avishai
authors: A
authors: Henik
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy.
authors: Luisa
authors: L
authors: Girelli
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D011932:Reading; D065855:Spatial Processing / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Cancellation task; Hemispheric specialization; Line bisection task; Reading habits; Visuospatial attention