Urbanization increases left-bias in line-bisection: an expression of elevated levels of intrinsic alertness?

Karina J Linnell,Serge Caparos,Jules Davidoff

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01127

Karina J Linnell, Serge Caparos + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01127

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Abstract

Urbanization impairs attentional selection and increases distraction from task-irrelevant contextual information, consistent with a reduction in attentional engagement with the task in hand. Previously, we proposed an attentional-state account of these findings, suggesting that urbanization increases intrinsic alertness and with it exploration of the wider environment at the cost of engagement with the task in hand. Here, we compare urbanized people with a remote people on a line-bisection paradigm. We show that urbanized people have a left spatial bias where remote people have no significant bias. These findings are consistent with the alertness account and provide the first test of why remote peoples have such an extraordinary capacity to concentrate.

Highlights

Remote peoples living in natural environments have an extraordinary capacity for attentional selection of task-relevant material
While our findings are consistent with remote peoples having less activity in the right-lateralised system mediating alertness— that is lower levels of intrinsic alertness—than urbanized groups, we must consider alternative or additional explanations for our findings
Despite the fact that the research on reading direction is inconclusive (e.g., Chokron et al, 1998; Nicholls and Roberts, 2002), experience with left-toright scanning in our British participants could have produced a slight leftwards bias absent in the Himba. That this possibility is inconsistent with the fact that the Himba and British spatial biases were indistinguishable in the latter part of the day

Summary

Introduction

Remote peoples living in natural environments have an extraordinary capacity for attentional selection of task-relevant material. Urbanization, line-bisection, and alertness out to test here is that urbanization induces, probably through stress-related effects (Lederbogen et al, 2011), elevated levels of intrinsic alertness even under resting conditions and shifts the balance in favor of exploration and away from task engagement.

Results

Conclusion