Abstract
Maki, Grandy, and Hauge (1979) found that right-left discriminations were not more difficult than up-down discriminations when no directional words were used. However, Farrell (1979) found that right-left discriminations took longer than up-down discriminations in a non-verbal go/no-go task. Two experiments were conducted to isolate the reasons for the different results. No directional words were used in either experiment, and there was no difference between response times to right-left and up-down stimuli in several different conditions. While there may have been some subtle procedural difference between Farrell’s procedures and ours, generally, right-left discriminations do not seem to take longer than up-down discriminations when directional words are not used.
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Maki, R. H. The role of label encoding in right-left as compared to up-down judgments. Paper presented at the meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, 1977.
References
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I am grateful to Cheryl Grandy and Verlin Hinsz for testing the subjects in Experiment 2.
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Maki, R.H. Right-left and up-down are equally discriminable in the absence of directional words. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 14, 181–184 (1979). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329438
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329438