Spatial aspects of letter cancellation performance in Arabic readers

Studies of visuospatial and directed attention that used subjects drawn from cultures with left-to-right reading patterns have suggested a slight performance bias toward left space. This pattern could reflect an intrinsic, organic, bias in spatial processing or the confounding effect of overlearned reading patterns. We studied the spatial distribution of errors on random array letter cancellation tasks obtained from 128 healthy Syrians who were native readers of Arabic. Fifty-eight of the 128 subjects (45.3%) made a total of 91 errors in which they omitted cancelling a target. The distribution of errors was not spatially biased. This differs from the error pattern reported for native readers of English on a similar task. The findings, consistent with results of other approaches, suggest that reading patterns influence visuospatial attention, but are not the sole cause of spatial biases observed in readers of Indo-European languages.