Choosing sides: lateralization in line trisection and quadrisection as a function of reading direction and handedness

Abstract

It might be intuited that a person's reading direction will impact linguistic and/or oculomotor tasks. Whether it also influences nonlanguage tasks, and by what means, is less clear. A novel technique to probe this effect is introduced in this paper, and the affirmative results are presented. The line bisection task has been a standard bedside diagnostic technique for assessing hemifield spatial neglect for many years. In recent years, numerous studies have also examined how normal subjects perform on this task. A recent line of study has focused on the reading habits of the subjects and the effect it has on line bisection. Most European languages are read from left to right, and it is thus postulated that readers of those languages will scan a line from left to right. On the other hand, Hebrew is read from right to left. These previous studies have yielded intriguing results about the role that reading direction plays in nonlanguage tasks. The present study utilized two other line partition tasks, line trisection and line quadrisection, and subjects whose principal reading language was either right-to-left or left-to-right. These tasks are ambiguous when used without instructing the subject on which side to perform the line transection. It was found that principal language was correlated with the side on which the subject chose to trisect or quadrisect the line. However, there was no correlation between preferred side and writing hand and there was no significant difference in accuracy between the preferred side and the secondary side. Thus, the preferred side in this nonlanguage task does not seem to be influenced by writing hand or accuracy but rather would seem to depend exclusively upon the earliest legitimate point, as determined by reading direction.