Further evidence that Whorfian effects are stronger in the right visual field than the left

Abstract

The Whorf hypothesis holds that differences between languages induce differences in perception and/or cognition in their speakers. Much of the experimental work pursuing this idea has focused on the domain of color and has centered on the issue of whether linguistically coded color categories influence color discrimination. A new perspective has been cast on the debate by recent results that suggest that language influences color discrimination strongly in the right visual field but not in the left visual field (LVF). This asymmetry is likely related to the contralateral projection of visual fields to cerebral hemispheres and the specialization of the left hemisphere for language. The current study presents three independent experiments that replicate and extend these earlier results by using different tasks and testing across different color category boundaries. Our results differ in one respect: although we find that Whorfian effects on color are stronger for stimuli in the right visual field than in the LVF, we find that there are significant category effects in the LVF as well. The origin of the significant category effect in the LVF is considered, and two factors that might account for the pattern of results are proposed.

Fig. 1.

The category effect is larger in the RVF than in the LVF in a reanalysis of the data from a color identification task used by Daoutis et al. (16). (a) Stimuli in CIE coordinates. The within-category set contains three hues of green: G1, G2, G3; the across-category set contains a blue (B), a purple (Pu), and a pink (Pi). Perceptual distance is the same for all adjacent pairs across both sets (G1-G2, G2-G3, B-Pu, and Pu-Pi). When a peripheral stimulus (e.g., G1) is the target, it is linearly separable from the distractors (G2 G3). (b) Illustration of a target-present trial with 15 distractors. The target is indicated here by the arrow that, however, was not present in the display itself. (c and d) Target detection times for within- and across-category targets by LVF and RVF: collapsed across linear separability (c) and linearly separable targets alone (d). Error bars show 95% confidence limits.

Fig. 2.

A larger category effect is observed in the RVF on a color detection task. (a) Munsell codes of the stimuli; stimuli varied in hue at constant value and chroma. Hue separations were either five steps (far set) or 2.5 steps (near set). The target was either in the same color category as the background (e.g., 10BG on 5B, both blue) or in the adjacent category (e.g., 10BG on 5BG, blue on green). (b) Illustration of a test frame: white circles show possible target locations around the fixation cross, and the black circle representing the target. (c and d) Blue-green set: The difference in RT between within- and across-category is larger in the RVF (c). Target-background perceptual separation only affects the RVF (d). (e) Blue-purple set: Again, the difference in RT between within- and across-category is larger in the RVF. Error bars are 95% confidence limits.