Maki R H, Grandy C A, Hauge G
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 1979 Feb;5(1):52-67. doi: 10.1037//0096-1523.5.1.52.
Adults take longer to judge the locations of horizontal stimuli than to judge the locations of vertical stimuli. In order to determine the source of this difficulty with the horizontal dimension, the congruity between the locations of stimuli and verbal descriptions was judged in a reaction time (RT) task. Because bilateral symmetry of the nervous system may be related to the difficulty with horizontal stimuli, this was varied by using right-handed, left-handed, and ambidextrous subjects. However, this variable produced no significant effects in the RT task. Horizontal stimuli took longer than vertical stimuli whether the verbal description was encoded before or during the RT periods, suggesting that label encoding is not the entire source of the effect. However, when the verbal labels were eliminated entirely by having subjects learn and use stimulus-letter pairs, horizontal stimuli did not take longer than vertical stimuli. This suggests that perception of the stimulus is not the cause of the difficulty. Together, the experiments indicated that comparing horizontal labels to stimuli is the largest source of the difficulty in telling right from left. Reasons why adults have such a problem were discussed.
成年人判断水平刺激的位置比判断垂直刺激的位置所需时间更长。为了确定在水平维度上出现这种困难的根源，在一项反应时（RT）任务中，对刺激位置与言语描述之间的一致性进行了判断。由于神经系统的双侧对称性可能与水平刺激的困难有关，因此通过使用右利手、左利手和双手灵巧的受试者来改变这一因素。然而，这一变量在反应时任务中未产生显著影响。无论言语描述是在反应时期间之前还是期间进行编码，水平刺激比垂直刺激所需时间更长，这表明标签编码并非该效应的全部根源。然而，当通过让受试者学习并使用刺激 - 字母对而完全消除言语标签时，水平刺激所需时间并不比垂直刺激长。这表明对刺激的感知不是造成困难的原因。综合来看，这些实验表明，将水平标签与刺激进行比较是区分左右时困难的最大根源。文中还讨论了成年人出现此类问题的原因。
