Reproducibility of visual-field asymmetries: Nine replication studies investigating lateralization of visual...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Behavioral studies suggest visual processing efficiency varies between the left and right visual fields.
• Previous findings on visual-field asymmetries (VFAs) are inconsistent, with unclear reasons for discrepancies.
• Reproducibility of VFAs is crucial for understanding visual information processing lateralization.

Purpose of the Study:

• To rigorously examine the reproducibility of previously reported visual-field asymmetries (VFAs).
• To clarify the reliability of VFAs across different visual stimuli and tasks.
• To contribute to a better understanding of visual information processing lateralization.

Main Methods:

• Conducted (near-)exact replications of nine representative studies on VFAs.
• Employed a rigorous methodological and statistical approach with sufficient statistical power.
• Utilized Bayesian analyses on individual and combined datasets, considering reaction times and error rates.

Main Results:

• Found reliable evidence supporting VFAs in processing faces, emotional expressions, global/local information, words, and spatial attention distribution.
• Observed less convincing evidence for VFAs in processing high and low spatial frequencies.
• Found no evidence for VFAs in categorical perception of color/shape oddballs or spatial relation judgments.

Conclusions:

• Confirmed the reproducibility of several key visual-field asymmetries (VFAs).
• Highlighted the need for rigorous replication in establishing the reliability of visual processing lateralization.
• Results inform theories of visual lateralization, emphasizing consistent VFAs in some domains and inconsistent findings in others.