The cerebral hemispheres differ in their capacity for content-to-level binding but not for identification: Evidence from conjunction errors obtained with bilateral hierarchical stimuli

Abstract

It is widely assumed that the right and left cerebral hemispheres are specialised for processing the global and local information of hierarchical stimuli, respectively. This idea has further been specified in the content-to-level binding theory (Hübner & Volberg, 2005) by stating that the hemispheres differ in their efficiency for binding the contents of a stimulus to their respective level. In contrast, it is assumed that the hemispheres do not differ in their capacity for the identification of the information at the two levels. This latter hypothesis was tested in the present experiment by presenting a hierarchical letter to each visual field. As expected, there were visual field effects only for errors involving the erroneous binding between a letter and a level. For errors that result from the mislocalisation of a letter, there were no visual field effects. Together, the data support the hypothesis that the hemispheres do not differ in their identification capacity.

Keywords:

• Feature binding
• Conjunction errors
• Global/local processing
• Visual field effects