The role of attention in visual bilateral matching tasks

The consistent finding of studies employing visual matching tasks has been a reaction time and accuracy advantage for judgements about stimuli presented bilaterally when compared to the average performance of the two unilateral field presentations. As with recent studies showing the influence of attention on reaction times to unilateral presentations, we hypothesized that attentional mechanisms may also play a role in the speed advantage seen with bilateral letter presentations. The present study employed random dot-patterns ("dot-primes"), presented in the upper half of the LVF, RVF, Bilateral VF, or absent, as abrupt onset peripheral cues to attract attention automatically. Letter pairs followed immediately (14 msecs) after the dot-primes in the lower half of the LVF, RVF, or Bilateral VF. The results for unilateral dot-primes, followed by unilateral letter pairs, were consistent with previous studies showing that the field advantage for a particular task can be altered using abrupt onset attentional cues, with the advantage going to the field where the attentional prime is presented. Bilateral dot-primes did reduce latencies to subsequent bilateral letter pairs, but bilateral primes also reduced latencies to both LVF and RVF letter pairs, in nearly the same proportion as for bilateral letter pairs. Latencies for RVF-primes/Bilateral-letters were as fast as for Bilateral-primes/Bilateral-letters, and both of these conditions were significantly faster than LVF-primes/Bilateral-letters. The results suggest that attention plays a relatively minor role in the bilateral field advantage, and that non-attentional factors (i.e. interhemispheric dynamics) account for most of the asymmetric unilateral-prime influence on bilateral performance. Possible interhemispheric factors which may contribute to these results are discussed.