Reading direction and attention: effects on lateralized ignoring

The effects of the scan for the first element in reading (leftmost in English, rightmost in Hebrew) on the ability of subjects to ignore irrelevant stimuli in one visual field more than in the other were investigated. The hypothesis tested was that English readers would have a harder time ignoring irrelevant stimuli in the left visual field than in the right visual field, with the opposite pattern predicted for readers of Hebrew. The paradigm employed by Banich (Banich & Belger, 1990) was used with two letter matching tasks. The results showed that when an irrelevant letter was present, English readers responded more slowly in the right than in the left visual field, and Hebrew readers showed the opposite pattern (Experiment 1). This interaction did not occur when the irrelevant letter was deleted (Experiment 2). These findings are discussed in terms of their relation to eye movements and covert attention and to the use of bilateral displays in neuropsychological experiments.