The Role of Binocular Vision in Driving Pseudoneglect in Visual and Haptic Bisection: Evidence From Strabismic and Monocular Blind Individuals.

Zaira Cattaneo,Tomaso Vecchi,Andrea Ciricugno,Lotfi B Merabet,Luca Rinaldi

doi:10.1163/22134808-20191347

Zaira Cattaneo, Tomaso Vecchi + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1163/22134808-20191347

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Abstract

Prior studies have shown that strabismic amblyopes do not exhibit pseudoneglect in visual line bisection, suggesting that the right-hemisphere dominance in the control of spatial attention may depend on a normally developing binocular vision. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether an abnormal binocular childhood experience also affects spatial attention in the haptic modality, thus reflecting a supramodal effect. To this aim, we compared the performance of normally sighted, strabismic and early monocular blind participants in a visual and a haptic line bisection task. In visual line bisection, strabismic individuals tended to err to the right of the veridical midpoint, in contrast with normally sighted participants who showed pseudoneglect. Monocular blind participants exhibited high variability in their visual performance, with a tendency to bisect toward the direction of the functioning eye. In turn, in haptic bisection, all participants consistently erred towards the left of the veridical midpoint. Taken together, our findings support the view that pseudoneglect in the visual and haptic modality relies on different functional and neural mechanisms.

Highlights

People tend to associate some properties in one sensory modality to those in another modality, a phenomenon called crossmodal correspondences
We examined the role of a phonetic property of Mandarin Chinese – lexical tones – together with vowels in sound–shape mappings and sound–size mappings
Our results suggest that the participants used both vowels and lexical tones when performing the sound–shape matching task

Summary

Introduction

People tend to associate some properties in one sensory modality to those in another modality, a phenomenon called crossmodal correspondences In sound–shape mappings, the bouba–kiki effect constitutes the most wellknown example: people often match visual shapes with rounded contours to spoken pseudowords such as ‘maluma’ or ‘bouba,’ whereas they match others with angular contours to spoken pseudowords such as ‘takete’ or ‘kiki’ (e.g., Holland and Wertheimer, 1964; Köhler, 1929, 1947) Such sound–shape mapping is suggested to be universal because it has reliably been demonstrated in adults from various cultures (Bremner et al, 2013; Davis, 1961; Rogers and Ross, 1975). These results suggest that sound–shape mappings were affected by the participant’s own perceptual styles and language experiences (e.g., Chen et al, 2016; Rogers and Ross, 1975; Shang and Styles, 2017)

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