Dichotic Listening and Cerebral Dominance

Abstract

It has recently been suggested that errors of report in the sequential recall of simultaneously presented auditory stimuli may be due to the inferior perception of those stimuli, under conditions of auditory competition, which are delivered to the ear ipsilateral to the cerebral hemisphere dominant for speech. It can, however, be argued that this is not necessarily the most adequate hypothesis to account for these and analagous data. Evidence may be adduced which suggests that the order of recall may be of more importance than laterality of recall. The errors of reproduction observed may therefore be due to a decay of input in a short-term store rather than due to the failure of part of the input to enter the system. Since such short-term storage may be a crucial and vulnerable link in the whole chain of learning it might be anticipated that defects in this process would be found in cases of learning disorder. Studies are cited which show that this appears, in fact, to be the case.