Biomedical subjects

E L Cowin

Publications and source records attributed to E L Cowin.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1994

Individual variation in hemispheric asymmetry: multitask study of effects related to handedness and sex.

Functional hemispheric asymmetries were examined for right- or left-handed men and women. Tasks involved (a) auditory processing of verbal material, (b) processing of emotions shown on faces, (c) processing of visual categorical and coordinate spatial relations, and (d) visual processing of verbal material. Similar performance asymmetries were found for the right-handed and left-handed groups, but the average asymmetries tended to be smaller for the left-handed group. For the most part, measures of performance asymmetry obtained from the different tasks did not correlate with each other, suggesting that individual subjects cannot be simply characterized as strongly or weakly lateralized. However, ear differences obtained in Task 1 did correlate significantly with certain visual field differences obtained in Task 4, suggesting that both tasks are sensitive to hemispheric asymmetry in similar phonetic or language-related processes.

Brain↗

PubMed1991

Perceptual reference frames and visual field asymmetry for verbal processing.

Two experiments investigated the role of perceptual reference frames in producing visual field asymmetries for the recognition of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonsense syllables. In an upright stimulus display condition, both quantitative and qualitative visual field asymmetries replicated those obtained in earlier studies of CVC identification. When the stimulus displays were rotated 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise, there were no effects of presenting the CVC in relative LVF vs relative RVF stimulus locations. The contrast between results in the upright and rotated stimulus display conditions indicates that the LVF/RVF differences in the upright displays are attributable to the position of the CVC relative to the fovea, rather than relative to the perceptual reference frame. This finding is consistent with the interpretation that LVF/RVF differences in the upright condition are attributable to hemispheric differences in the processing of linguistic/phonetic information.

Adult↗