LATERALLY BIASED ATTENTION WITH CONCURRENT VERBAL LOAD - MULTIPLE FAILURES TO REPLICATE

The attentional bias hypothesis states that visual field asymmetries emerge when the activation of a lateralized processor drives attention in the contralateral direction in humans. Support for the hypothesis comes from experiments in which holding words in memory produces a right visual field superiority in recognition, where no asymmetry otherwise exists. Experiments [3] failed to replicate this work, even when the original methodology was closely duplicated. Caution should be observed in proposing the attentional bias viewpoint as an explanation for lateral asymmetries.