Papers by Stephen M Williams
Academia Letters, 2022
The book by Rik Smits The Puzzle of Left-Handedness (2012) summarized a great deal of evidence th... more The book by Rik Smits The Puzzle of Left-Handedness (2012) summarized a great deal of evidence that left-handers are different in various ways, and Howard Kushner (2017) too takes the view in his concluding chapter that this phenomenon does matter. Both review disparities in prevalence of left-handedness across, say, cultures and sex, while acknowledging (Kushner, a left-hander himself, more reluctantly) the marked fact that such people are a minority (see, for example, Paracchini, 2021). The effect on prevalence figures of negative attitudes towards left-handers is part of the story. For example left-hander prevalence is colossally greater amongst Chinese Americans than in mainland China or Taiwan. This has a bearing on understanding international relations as well as the old issue as to whether we are born or made. Workers in the "nature" tradition might be more interested in neurology, while those in the "nurture" tradition might be more interested in the work of left-handed dentists or lefthanded pilots. Minority status seems to persist as far back as we can look, both the motor biases and possibly associated anatomical asymmetries, though showing increases in the predominance of right-handedness over time (Uomini NT and Ruck L, 2018). All these workers allude to the variety of ways of appraising left-handedness, even to the extent of explaining some of the problem of replicability of results. Once it was realized that people who classify themselves as left-handed often do some things with the right hand and conversely, and that using writing hand as the criterion of handedness leaves a lot out, preference measures of handedness moved to multi-item inventories, such as the much-used Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (Oldfield, 1971). A recent trial of the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (8-item version, EHI-8, Williams SM, 2020) found that, as revised, it identifies pure right-handedness well (59 of 76 = 78% scored laterality quotient 100). A further four participants scored between +50 and 100 and thirteen were not right-handed. Of these thirteen, seven were left-handed (LQ ≤-50) and
Psychology: A Quarterly Journal of Human Behavior, 1985
Abstract 1. Four experiments with 120 college students investigated the possibility of monaural e... more Abstract 1. Four experiments with 120 college students investigated the possibility of monaural ear differences caused by left-hemisphere speech specialization beyond the phonological/perceptual stage. The task paradigms were verbal free recall and discrimination of recency, word recognition, and sentence recall. No main effect for the ear was found. Thus, there is no evidence that the study of ear asymmetry in normal Ss throws any light on hemispheric asymmetry for organizational language processes. Contrary ...
Psychology, 1988
Abstract 1. Suggests that the cerebral hemispheres may form the basis for an analysis of the rela... more Abstract 1. Suggests that the cerebral hemispheres may form the basis for an analysis of the relation between parts and whole. This concept is discussed in terms of hemispheric specialization and the arrangement of the corpus callosum, which" maps" neurons from one hemisphere to the other.(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
Neuropsychologia, 1982
No confirmation could be obtained that the magnitude of the dichotic REA for speech is affected b... more No confirmation could be obtained that the magnitude of the dichotic REA for speech is affected by whether the stimuli are syntactically structured. Recall-order was controlled in Experiment 1 by cueing one ear immediately after a dichotic stimulus; in Experiment 2 by cueing before a stimulus. The subject's reported ear preference for telephone usage was correlated with his ear difference in the first experiment but not in the second. Perhaps telephone usage causes an attentional bias (for speech) to one or other ear, more often to the right; which is overridden by the precued instruction to attend to a particular ear. *These experiments are taken from a D.Phil dissertation ([I] Experiments 7 and 8) which gives a great deal more detail, background and discussion. The experiments were carried out at the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, the provision of whose facilities is gratefully acknowledged.
Cortex, 1989
No Abstract or Summary but some introductory remarks in full-text
A tendency to perceive rightwards-placed stimuli as later seems to be implanted by sequential lef... more A tendency to perceive rightwards-placed stimuli as later seems to be implanted by sequential left-to-right reading habits. In forced-choice tasks it is assumed that there is no bias to a particular interval, particularly where it is cross modal from the stimulus. However with written alternatives in horizontal alignment this experiment showed such a bias for judgments of recency.
The right visual-field advantage for bilateral presentation put forward by McKeever and Huling wa... more The right visual-field advantage for bilateral presentation put forward by McKeever and Huling was investigated. The central-fixation task was varied so that in one condition this task was nonverbal. Results gave some support for scanning-type explanations in this paradigm but overall favoured Kinsbourne's activation-and-priming account.
Neither a group of pure right-handers nor a complementary group excluding pure right-handers show... more Neither a group of pure right-handers nor a complementary group excluding pure right-handers showed much sign of a monaural REA for free recall performance...
The relationship between handedness and preferred ear for telephoning was examined. Both variable... more The relationship between handedness and preferred ear for telephoning was examined. Both variables were assessed by questionnaire.Telephone ear may be supplementary to hemispheric dominance as an explanation of dichotic ear differences for speech.Increased degree of sinistrality was associated with increased tendency to use the left ear for telephoning in the sample (N = 140). There is a tendency to pick up a telephone receiver with the preferred hand and hold its earpiece to the ipsilateral ear.This may relate to reports of reduced right-ear advantage in left-handers.
32 subjects heard two dichotic tapes, one of sentences and one of unrelated words. Difference sco... more 32 subjects heard two dichotic tapes, one of sentences and one of unrelated words. Difference scores between the ears on the two tapes intercorrelated .52. suggesting contrary to a previous report, some stimulus-independence of the right ear advantage.
It is argued that in spite of the methodological and interpretive problems with them, experiments... more It is argued that in spite of the methodological and interpretive problems with them, experiments on laterality in normal subjects must continue in view of other problems with direct neuroclinical investigations. A variety of such problems are listed, ranging from the relative paucity of the potential subject population to the difficulty in inferring normal function from damaged brains. The main justification for such studies must be the possible amelioration of the lot of brain-damaged patients and improvement of their treatment rather than scientific curiosity.
Preliminary results with the group right-sided advantage technique suggest that it reflects diffe... more Preliminary results with the group right-sided advantage technique suggest that it reflects differential storage rather than perception and that strong lateralization is correlated with superior performance.
It has been suggested that in a second unexpected recall information can only come from a longer ... more It has been suggested that in a second unexpected recall information can only come from a longer term store which the more recent items have less chance of reaching and this leads to a negative effect of within-list recency for this second recall session. Two experiments showed a negative effect of recency even when recent items seemed likely to have come from long term store because initial recall had been delayed. This favours an interpretation of recency in terms of ordinal retrieval starting, where there is negative recency, more often with the first item and working forward.
These four experiments investigated the possibility of monaural ear differences due to left hemis... more These four experiments investigated the possibility of monaural ear differences due to left hemisphere speech specialization beyond the phonological/perceptual stage. The experiments concurred in finding such "organizational" ear differences indiscernible. The task paradigms were verbal free recall and discrimination of recency word recognition and sentence recall. Contrary previous results are explained. An incidental finding was that words are recognized better if tested on the same ear as that of previous presentation, possibly suggesting a lateralized engram persists in asymmetry.
Ecological attitudes of 11-year old children were investigated by means of a modified short vers... more Ecological attitudes of 11-year old children were investigated by means of a modified short version of a standard questionnaire. Children (N=200) from urban and rural backgrounds in Northern Ireland were compared, and the rural children found to have a higher degree of environmental consciousness, perhaps deriving from the relative simplicity of their environmental background. There was little evidence of a gender difference in environmental attitudes previously reported in an older age group, but a distinctive gender pattern of greater affect about environmental problems combined with less commitment to take action about them was found to characterize not only girls in general, but particularly urban girls. Presumably, these subgroups are more aware than others of the economic benefits typically accompanying environmental problems. In the sample as a whole, affect about the environment was not correlated at all with commitment to action to preserve it.
A response-type (‘present’ responses faster than ‘absent’ responses) reaction-time effect was fou... more A response-type (‘present’ responses faster than ‘absent’ responses) reaction-time effect was found in the S. Sternberg high-speed memory scanning paradigm by means of presenting the target/probe stimulus briefly in peripheral vision. The probe was presented 3 degrees left or right of fixation. The large (113 msec) response effect did not interact with the marked reaction-time effect of two types of stimulus differing in ease of nameability, nor with two laterality variables. An explanation of the effect consistent with Sternberg's (1975) multiple-stage processing model is presented: the effect appears to arise at the stage of binary decision as to whether the probe was present in the memory set or not. The mechanism of the effect depends on the possibility of the memory stimulus priming the probe stimulus in the ‘present’ condition. Such priming must be much more effective where probe stimulus and the trace of the memory stimulus do not, because of their separation within the visual field, mask each other either backwards or forwards. The experiment found the orthodox linear effect of memory set size, not interacting with type of response, consistent with the common attribution of an exhaustive serial comparison process. Some relevance of the paradigm to laterality was also exhibited. A confirmatory experiment replicated the response-type effect with the probe presented above as well as to left and right of fixation, and showed no effect in a control condition of central presentation
There remains deep disagreement within psychology about the past achievements of the discipline a... more There remains deep disagreement within psychology about the past achievements of the discipline and whether it is heading in the right direction ...
Bibliographic analysis of publications and their citations has seen a variety of uses in scholarl... more Bibliographic analysis of publications and their citations has seen a variety of uses in scholarly literature ...
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Papers by Stephen M Williams