What Are the Contributions of Handedness, Sighting Dominance, Hand Used to Bisect, and Visuospatial Line Processing to the Behavioral Line Bisection Bias?

Audrey Ochando, Laure Zago

In a sample of 60 French participants, we examined whether the variability in the behavioral deviation measured during the classical "paper and pencil" line bisection task was explained by individual laterality factors such as handedness and eye sighting dominance, as well as the hand used to bisect, and the spatial position of the line to bisect. The results showed the expected main effects of line position and hand used to bisect, as well as some interactions between factors. Specifically, the effect of the hand used to bisect on the deviation bias was different as a function of handedness and line position. In right-handers, there was a strong difference between the biases elicited by each hand, producing a hand-used asymmetry, observed for each spatial position of the line. In left-handers, there was no difference in deviation as a function of hand used to perform the bisection, except when all factors triggered attention toward the left side such as bisecting left-displaced lines, with the left dominant hand, producing a strong leftward deviation as compared to the reduced bias exhibited with the right non-dominant hand. Finally, the eye sighting dominance interacted with handedness and line position. Left-handers with a right sighting dominance showed a leftward bias when they bisected left-displaced lines, while right-handers with a left sighting dominance showed an inversed bias when they bisected rightward lines. Taken together, these findings suggest that the behavioral deviation bias relies on the integration of the hemispheric weights of the visuospatial processing of the stimuli, and the motoric component of the hand used to bisect, as well as those linked to individual laterality factors. When all these factors producing asymmetric cerebral activation coincide in the same direction, then their joint effect will provide the strongest asymmetric behavioral biases.