Sentence imagery and recall: an electroencephalographic evaluation of hemispheric processing in males and females

Hemispheric alpha asymmetries were obtained for males and females during the presentation of sentences comprised of high imagery and low imagery words. The subject's task was to later recall lexical items for each imagery group. The subjects were also administered a modified version of Paivio's (1971) Individual Differences Questionnaire (IDQ). The results indicated that females appeared to process both sentence types left hemispherically while males used the right hemisphere for these stimuli. No difference in processing was found for the two imagery conditions. Females scored higher than males on both subtests of the IDQ and tended to recall more items from both imagery conditions. The results are discussed in terms of stimulus and task variables which may affect hemispheric processing.