Representational Pseudoneglect in the Absence of Visual Processing

Abstract

The phenomenon of visuospatial pseudoneglect proposes that perception can be biased towards the left-hand side of visual space. Current literature identified a similar lateral bias in the mental representations of spatial arrays, either through memory of familiar scenes or novel material. However the majority of previous research has involved some degree of initial visual processing, and therefore it can be questioned if the lateral bias originates in the initial perception or if in fact there is an independent bias in memory storage. The present experiment aimed to investigate whether more items on the left are accurately remembered than those on the right, by using aural-verbal description task to create a mental representation of a pattern on a 3x4 matrix. Additionally feature binding and a verbal suppression task were included in order to limit capacity of the short-term memory and to eliminate the possibility of participants verbally rehearsing the information. Both feature binding and verbal suppression increased the amount of errors made. In the current sample, a non-significant finding was found between accuracy scores on the left and right-hand side.