Cognitive consequences of asymmetrical visual distraction.

The authors explored whether manipulating the location of distraction in the participants' visual field influences the degree of competition between visual and other cognitive processes. If a cognitive task is lateralized to a particular hemisphere, visual distraction directed toward that same hemisphere should impair performance on that task more than should visual distraction directed toward the other hemisphere. Consistent with this hypothesis, the authors found in Experiments 1 and 2 that participants better recalled words of high imageability in a verbal memory task when the examiner was in the participant's left visual field (right hemisphere) than when the examiner was in the participant's right visual field (left hemisphere). In Experiment 3, the authors found that this effect reversed for performance on a right-hemisphere spatial task.