Skylar Greenberg¹, Grace Sinclair¹, Joseph Schmidt¹; ¹University of Central Florida

Early spatial biases, indicated by initial saccades, have been observed in both linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. Studies have demonstrated an early leftward spatial bias in non-linguistic tasks like driving, memory, free-viewing, and visual search (Durgin et al., 2008; Staugaard et al., 2016; Dickinson & Intraub, 2009; Hartmann et al., 2019); whereas a rightward attentional spread occurs in left-to-right English reading, reflected in horizontal linguistic search tasks (Ojanpää, 2002; Rayner & Raney, 1996). We expect to see stronger search guidance (indicated by the proportion of initial search saccades directed toward the target) on the left for object search tasks due to the early leftward bias and stronger guidance on the right for word search due to the rightward attentional span in English reading. We conducted two experiments examining the proportion of initial saccades to the left side, and search guidance in Visual Word Search (Experiment 1) and Object Search (Experiment 2). In both experiments, participants searched for a target word or object among a circular array of distractor words/objects while eye movements were recorded. Targets were present equally often on the left and right side of the array. Both conditions exhibited an early leftward spatial bias. Search guidance was stronger on the right for the object search but stronger on the left for word search. Object guidance results are likely linked to the left hemisphere’s efficiency in recognizing physical features of symbols in the right visual field (Polich, 1982), whereas the word search guidance effect is likely because English reading requires a leftward shift to start reading. Collectively, this demonstrates that an early spatial bias does not lead stronger search guidance in that region, and bias and guidance are non-uniform across the visual field (Kosovicheva & Whitney, 2017) and vary by stimulus type.