Left-ear-driven representational pseudoneglect for mentally represented real-word scenes created from aural–verbal description

Abstract

The current research explored pseudoneglect for the mental representation of real-world scenes generated from aural–verbal description in the complete absence of direct visual processing. Healthy participants listened binaurally or monaurally to aural–verbal descriptions of novel real-world scenes with familiar landmarks (e.g. ‘shop’, ‘cafe’, ‘school’) to be imagined on the left- or right-hand side. Participants were asked to mentally represent the street scene using a visuospatial template though it was up to participants how they mentally represented each individual landmark within the street (i.e. in terms of colour and size). There were two main tasks: a relative judgement task (which side of the street contains the most landmarks?) and a recall task (recall the landmarks on the left vs. right side of the street). When stimuli were presented monaurally to the left ear (favouring the activation of the right hemisphere) participants demonstrated representational pseudoneglect and showed a bias towards responding that there were more landmarks on the left compared to the right. However, this did not lead to enhanced recall for left side landmarks. When stimuli were presented binaurally or monaurally to the right ear, there was no evidence of representational pseudoneglect for the relative judgement or recall task. The current study discusses how the use of monaural presentation may boost right hemisphere activation in aural–verbal experimental paradigms designed to explore representational pseudoneglect.