TITLE:
Influence of the Learnt Direction of Reading on TemporalOrder Judgments
AUTHORS:
Alejandro Pérez, Lorna García, Mitchell Valdés-Sosa, Piotr Jaśkowski
KEYWORDS:
TOJ, Pseudoneglect, Spatial, Bias, Attention
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.2 No.2,
March
29,
2011
ABSTRACT: Our previous work has shown a leftward bias in the temporal order judgment task (Pérez, García, & Valdes-Sosa, 2008). This pseudoneglect was found in a sample of Spanish-speaking participants who read in a left-to-right manner. The goal of the current study was to examine if the reading related scanning habits modulate the bias observed in the TOJ task. To this aim, we replicated the study with Arabic participants who learned to read in a right-to-left direction. Results showed no lateralization suggesting that reading habit is probably a factor affecting the distribution of spatial attention. We suggested that our failure to obtain a reversed bias might be due to the fact that they experienced both types of reading habits. We also presented a possible explanation of why the finding of pseudoneglect in temporal order judgment tasks is rather unusual.