What is it about?
Does the direction in which one reads/writes affect how once conceptualizes and draws everyday scenes? To study this, two groups of adults - those whose language was English (left-to-right) or Arabic (right-to-left) drew a scene containing two houses, a “near house” and a “far house.” Whereas the majority drew the near house larger than the far house, the majority of English readers drew the near house on the left side of the page and the far house to the right of it. Arabic readers by contrast showed a slight right bias.
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Why is it important?
Previous research on asymmetries in object facing in drawing have tended to invoke a biological explanation in terms of the right cerebral hemisphere being better at visuospatial processing. The present study suggests that cultural factors (having to do with learned strategies arising from exposure to left-to-right vs. right-to-left reading) also exert an influence.
Perspectives
This work adds to the growing body of evidence on the broad scope of reading/writing directional biases and points to the importance of including understudied groups (such as Arabic users) in studies.
Professor Jyotsna Vaid
Texas A&M University College Station
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Script Directionality Affects Depiction of Depth in Representational Drawings, Social Psychology, January 2011, Hogrefe Publishing Group,
DOI: 10.1027/1864-9335/a000068.
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