Earlier research suggested that gaze direction has an impact on cognitive processing. It is likely that horizontal gaze direction increases activation in specific areas of the contralateral cerebral hemisphere. Consistent with the lateralization of memory functions, we previously showed that shifting gaze to the left improves visuo-spatial short-term memory. In the current study, we investigated the effect of unilateral gaze on verbal processing. We expected better performance with gaze directed to the right because language is lateralized in the left hemisphere. Also, an advantage of gaze directed upward was expected because local processing and object recognition are facilitated in the upper visual field. Observers directed their gaze at one of the corners of the computer screen while they performed lexical decision, grammatical gender and semantic discrimination tasks. Contrary to expectations, we did not observe performance differences between gaze directed to the left or right, which is consistent with the inconsistent literature on horizontal asymmetries with verbal tasks. However, RTs were shorter when observers looked at words in the upper compared to the lower part of the screen, suggesting that looking upwards enhances verbal processing.

中文翻译：

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查找可以提高言语任务的性能。

较早的研究表明，注视方向对认知加工有影响。水平注视方向可能会增加对侧大脑半球特定区域的激活。与记忆功能的侧向化一致，我们先前表明，将视线向左移动可改善视觉空间短期记忆。在当前的研究中，我们调查了单方面凝视对言语处理的影响。由于语言在左半球偏向侧面，因此我们期望将视线指向右侧会获得更好的性能。另外，由于在上视野中促进了局部处理和物体识别，因此预期了向上凝视的优点。观察者在执行词汇决策时将目光对准了计算机屏幕的一个角落，语法性别和语义歧视任务。与期望相反，我们没有观察到左右方向注视之间的性能差异，这与关于口头任务的水平不对称的文献不一致。但是，与屏幕下部相比，当观察者在上部查看单词时，RT较短，这表明向上看可增强语言处理能力。