Functional hemispheric differences for the categorization of global and local information in naturalistic stimuli

Abstract

Up to now functional hemispheric asymmetries for global/local processing have mainly been investigated with hierarchical letters as stimuli. In the present study. Three experiments were conducted to examine whether corresponding visual-field (VF) effects can also be obtained with more naturalistic stimuli. To this end, images of animals with a pattern placed on their body were displayed as stimuli. The task for the global level and for the local level was to categorize the animals and the patterns. respectively. As a result. VF-effects were also found for these stimuli and tasks. It is conduded that the hemispheric differences observed for hierarchical letters also hold for naturalistic stimuli.