ABSTRACT

Studies of cerebral lateralization often involve participants completing a series of perceptual tasks under laboratory conditions. This has constrained the number of participants recruited in such studies. Online testing can allow for much larger sample sizes but limits the amount of experimental control that is feasible. Here we considered whether online testing could give valid and reliable results on four tasks: a rhyme decision visual half-field task, a dichotic listening task, a chimeric faces task, and a finger tapping task. We recruited 392 participants, oversampling left-handers, who completed the battery twice. Three of the tasks showed evidence of both validity and reliability, insofar as they showed hemispheric advantages in the expected direction and test-retest reliability of at least r = .75. The reliability of the rhyme decision task was less satisfactory (r = .62). We also confirmed a prediction that extreme left-handers were more likely to depart from typical lateralization. Lateralization across the two language tasks (dichotic listening and rhyme judgement) was weakly correlated, but unrelated to lateralization on the chimeric faces task. We conclude that three of the tasks, dichotic listening, chimeric faces and finger tapping, show considerable promise for online evaluation of cerebral lateralization.

摘要

大脑偏侧化的研究通常涉及参与者在实验室条件下完成一系列感知任务。这限制了此类研究中招募的参与者数量。在线测试可以允许更大的样本量，但限制了可行的实验控制量。在这里，我们考虑了在线测试是否可以在四个任务上给出有效和可靠的结果：押韵决策视觉半场任务、二元听力任务、嵌合面孔任务和手指敲击任务。我们招募了 392 名参与者，对左撇子进行了过采样，他们完成了两次电池测试。其中三项任务显示了有效性和可靠性的证据，因为它们在预期方向上显示出半球优势，并且重测信度至少为r = .75。押韵决定任务的可靠性不太令人满意（r  = .62）。我们还证实了一个预测，即极端左撇子更有可能偏离典型的偏侧化。两种语言任务（双声道听力和韵律判断）的侧化是弱相关的，但与嵌合面孔任务的侧化无关。我们得出的结论是，其中的三项任务，双声道听力、嵌合面孔和手指敲击，显示出对大脑侧化在线评估的巨大前景。