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Central and Divided Visual Field Presentation of Emotional Images to Measure Hemispheric Differences in Motivated Attention

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Message-level processing of contextual information in the right cerebral hemisphere.

Bethanie Gouldthorp¹, Jeffrey Coney

¹School of Psychology, Murdoch University, South Street, Murdoch, WA 6150, Australia. B.Gouldthorp@murdoch.edu.au

Neuropsychologia

|October 28, 2008

Summary

The right hemisphere (RH) uses message-level processing for sentence comprehension, benefiting from context similarly to the left hemisphere (LH). This challenges previous findings suggesting limited RH contextual understanding.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Psychology
Psycholinguistics

Background:

Inconsistent findings exist regarding right hemisphere (RH) sentence comprehension and processing types.
Previous research suggests the RH may be less sensitive to message-level processing than the left hemisphere (LH).

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if the RH utilizes message-level mechanisms in sentence comprehension.
To determine if the RH benefits from contextual information beyond simple word associations.

Main Methods:

A computer-based lexical decision task was administered to 36 undergraduate psychology students.
Sentences with varying constraint levels (high, low, neutral) were presented centrally, with final words directed to the left or right visual field.
Reaction times and error rates were recorded to assess processing efficiency.

Main Results:

The RH showed facilitation with increased contextual information, comparable to the LH.
This facilitation was not solely attributable to enhanced word-level associations.
Findings indicate the RH engages in message-level processing.

Conclusions:

The RH is sensitive to message-level processing during sentence comprehension.
The RH benefits from contextual information similarly to the LH.
This study contradicts prior behavioral research on RH sentence comprehension.