Lateralization of Concrete and Abstract Characteristics Analysis in the Animal Brain

Abstract

The experiments were performed on 92 white Wistar rats. Motion-food technique for working out conditioned reflexes was used. The following models were used: reflexes to correlation, transfer of conditioned reflexes, invariant recognition of visual images. Cortex inactivation was achieved by means of spreading depression. Sufficiently crude reflexes to the correlation of geometrical figure area or straight line segment lengths in animal populations were shown to be equally impaired after right and left hemisphere inactivation. In forming conditioned reflexes to the area correlation of some other figures or their accumulations, as well as finer reflexes to the correlation of segment lengths, right hemisphere inactivation led mainly to the impairment of concrete stimuli characteristics, and left hemisphere inactivation to that of abstract ones. Conditioned reflex transfer to other geometrical figures was mainly impaired after left hemisphere inactivation. Invariant recognition of visual images was more impaired after left than after right hemisphere inactivation. The results obtained suggest that in animals the right hemisphere mainly analyses concrete stimuli characteristics, whereas the left one analyses their abstract characteristics.