Valorie Wiseman¹, Summer Sheremata², Sang Wook Hong¹; ¹Florida Atlantic University, ²Northeastern University

Visual Crowding occurs when a target that is easily identified in isolation becomes difficult to recognize when surrounded by distractors, reflecting a fundamental limit of attention. Although visual-field (VF) asymmetries in crowding have been attributed to reading, prior work with non-linguistic stimuli showed Left/Right asymmetries are not language-dependent and rightward crowding is modulated by attention. Additionally, hemispheric asymmetries have been reported in fMRI and EEG studies in response to high-task demand in visual attention tasks. Here, we hypothesize that visual attention is asymmetrically organized and may underlie the mechanisms of visual crowding. However, neural data is required to confirm this effect. In the current work, we predict that if the right hemisphere preferentially processes crowded visual information under high task demand, then ERP components of visual attention will be greater at the right electrodes compared to the left, and that this effect will be further enhanced when the pre-cue is absent. We conducted a pilot EEG study to measure three indices of visual attention: the N2pc, SPCN, and P3b. Formal statistical analyses were not conducted due to the limited sample size (N = 2). For the N2pc, mean amplitudes for Left and Right Target with Cue Present were 0.41 µV and 0.87 µV, respectively, while amplitudes for Left and Right Target with Cue Absent were –0.44 µV and –0.18 µV. SPCN amplitudes ranged from –0.99 µV to 0.59 µV across conditions, and P3 amplitudes ranged from –2.44 µV to 3.13 µV. This project found that all three ERP components exhibited a trend towards larger amplitudes in the right electrodes compared to the left, with an additional increase in the absence of a pre-cue. These pilot results suggest rightward hemispheric biases in crowding, highlighting the role of attentional asymmetries in visual crowding and attentional processing.