Left face matching bias: Right hemisphere dominance or scanning habits?

Abstract

A large body of work report a leftward bias in face processing. However, it is not clear whether this leftward bias purely reflects the dominance of the right hemisphere or is influenced by scanning habits developed by reading directions. Here, we report two experiments examining how well native readers of right to left Arabic scripts (Egyptians) could match (for identity) a target face that appeared with a companion to a line-up of 10 faces. There was a significant advantage for matching faces that appeared on the left. However, Experiment 2 found that the magnitude of this left face matching bias was almost three times weaker than the magnitude of the leftward bias shown by native readers of left to right English scripts (British). Accordingly, we suggest that the right hemisphere dominance for face processing underlies the leftward face perception bias, but with the interaction of scanning habits.

Keywords:

• Face matching
• Perceptual bias
• Scanning habits

Acknowledgements

We thank Markus Bindemann and A. Mike Burton for proofreading and comments. We also thank Chris McManus and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of the manuscript.

Notes

¹Answer: the target on the left is present, number 4.

²Answer: the target on the right is present, number 10.

³As Egyptian participants in Experiment 2 had generally lower experience in reading English and greater limitations in exposing to written English compared to participants used in Experiment 1, we examined the differences between these two groups of participants in matching left and right faces. The 2×2 mixed factor ANOVA (groups as a between factor and face position as a within factor) did not yield any significant main effects for all face matching measures (all f<1).