Signatures of functional visuospatial asymmetries in early infancy

Abstract

Adults present a large number of asymmetries in visuospatial behavior that are known to be supported by functional brain lateralization. Although there is evidence of lateralization for motor behavior and language processing in infancy, no study has explored visuospatial attention biases in the early stages of development. In this study, we tested for the presence of a leftward visuospatial bias (i.e., pseudoneglect) in 4- and 5-month-old infants using an adapted version of the line bisection task. Infants were trained to identify the center of a horizontal line (Experiment 1) while their eye gazes were monitored using a remote eye-tracking procedure to measure their potential gazing error. Infants exhibited a robust pseudoneglect, gazing leftward with respect to the veridical midpoint of the horizontal line. To investigate whether infants’ pseudoneglect generalizes to any given object or is dependent on the horizontal dimension, in Experiment 2 we assessed infants’ gaze deployment in vertically oriented lines. No leftward bias was found, suggesting that early visuospatial attention biases in infancy are constrained by the orientation of the visual plane in which the information is organized. The interplay between biological and cultural factors that might contribute to the early establishment of the observed leftward bias in the allocation of visuospatial attention is discussed.