The 2nd annual Interdisciplinary Approach to
Philosophical & Psychological Issues Conference

“Lateralization of sequence learning and transfer in a tactuo-spatial task”
David Bunch, Jonathan D. Walker & Alen Hajnal
University of Southern Mississippi

Participants learned how to go through a tabletop finger maze, an exemplary tactuo-spatial task that involves sequence memorization, without access to visual feedback by wearing a blindfold. Two hypotheses were tested: 1) Is learning and transfer in this task lateralized, and 2) what are the perceptuo-motor consequences of such lateralization? It is assumed that motor activity of the effector is influenced by the type of neural processing in the contralateral parts of the brain (Ward, Alvis, Sanford, Dodson & Pusakulich, 1989). To the extent that the right brain hemisphere facilitates spatial processing, and that the left hemisphere facilitates more abstract, language-like processing, using the left versus the right hand in the learning phase might make a difference in terms of speed and accuracy of learning. Indirect proof of this neuro-motor mapping was suggested by participants’ self-reports about the cognitive strategies they employed. Two third of the participants reported focusing on perceptual aspects of the task during the learning phase such as trying to visualize the maze and/or remember how the maze felt tactually, whereas the rest of the participants explicitly memorized directions. The results were discussed in the context of the debate between proponents of visual imagery (Kosslyn, 1973, 1995) and propositional cognitive mechanisms (Pylyshyn, 1973, 2003). An additional interesting finding was that the overwhelming majority of participants reported that the maze felt larger and more complicated than it looked after the blindfold was removed. Implications for the theory of multimodal space perception were discussed in the context of lateralized processing and emergence of motor skills.