Representational Pseudoneglect: is this phenomenon only apparent within the presence of perception?

Abstract

It has been recently shown that individuals demonstrate a leftward bias when recalling visual information that has been mentally represented, a discovery known as 'representational pseudoneglect'. However, as there is no evidence to suggest that individuals possess this leftward asymmetry within memory recall for mental representations of non-visual stimuli, it has been suggested that representational pseudoneglect may be a result of perceptual biases rather than biases within working memory. To investigate this, the present experiment required individuals to create mental representations of 3x4 patterns that were observed or verbally listened to and were then asked to recall the patterns from memory. Significant leftward biases were only found within the visual presentations as more accurate responses were made for the left hand sides of the patterns than the right. However, no lateral biases were found for recall of the patterns that had been verbally described. This further implies that representational pseudoneglect may be due to asymmetries within perception and that therefore leftward biases within memory recall can only be elicited when there is some degree of visual input involved.