The effects of sensory limitations on hemispheric processing.

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Abstract
How the [human] brain processes information is partly determined by the characteristics of the input. To examine whether the 2 cerebral hemispheres are equally affected by manipulations of quality of incoming information, 3 experiments using Posner''s paradigm (matching paris of letters of same or different case or name) were conducted under 8 different viewing conditions, consisting of manipulations of exposure duration, retinal eccentricity and stimulus size. The same procedure but different designs were used in the 3 studies: a between-subject design in experiment 1; a within-subject design with viewing conditions blocked experiment 2; a within-subject design with viewing conditions mixed in experiment 3. In all 3 experiments, exposure duration and retinal eccentricity each interacted with visual fields, whereas the interaction of letter size and visual field was significant only in experiment 2. Results are interpreted with respect to the properties of the visual system and its capacity to extract information in terms of the spatial-frequency spectral components of a stimulus. Methodological implications are discussed.