Right hemisphere superiority in visual orientation matching.

"Same" or "different" judgments were made by 22 right-handed college students in 2 orientation matching tasks. In 1 task pairs of lines were presented 4. left or right of fixation. Reaction times for both "same" and "different" judgments were faster if stimulus pairs were presented to the left visual field, indicating superiority of the right hemisphere for handling spatial information. In the other task the orientation of a standard line, held in memory, was compared with the orientation of a single test line projected to the left or right of fixation. Results were in the same direction as before, although the right hemisphere superiority was significant only for the "different" responses. Data do not support the idea that "same" and "different" judgments need be differentially lateralized. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)