Decision strategies and visual-field asymmetries in same-different judgments of word meaning

The accuracy with which observers judged whether two words belonged to the same semantic category was determined from a detection-theoretic analysis of same-different judgments. In Experiment 1, one word was presented centrally and the other word in either the left visual field (LVF) or the right visual field (RVF); in Experiment 2, both words were presented to either the LVF or the RVF. In order to obtain receiver-operating characteristics (ROCs) of performance, observers were asked to rate their confidence that the two words belonged to the same semantic category. Two models of the decision strategy were fitted to the obtained characteristics: a differencing model, in which the decision variable was the difference between the two observations; and an optimal model, in which each observation was judged in relation to a criterion. In both experiments, the optimal model provided a better fit than the differencing model to the obtained characteristics. Maximum-likelihood estimates of both the criterion-free parameter, d', and the area under the operating characteristic, p(A), were greater for words presented in the RVF than for those presented in the LVF.