The Impact Of Hemisphericity On Spatial And Verbal Information Processing:An Electrophysiological Investigation

The cognitive style of hemisphericity is a kind of popular classification standard for distinguishing individual cognitive style in academia.Previous studies have been limited to behavioral studies and lack of evidence of brain function to demonstrate the impact of the cognitive style classification.Based on this,the purpose of this study was to investigate the brain activation patterns of left and right brain-dominated cognitive style subjects dealing with information(including spatial and verbal information)through EEG techniques.A total of 37 students were selected in this study,including 17 subjects with left-brain-dominated cognitive style,6 males and 11 females(the mean of age:20.94,standard deviation:1.06;the mean of score:-22.50,standard deviation:7.39);20 subjects with right-brain-dominated cognitive style,9males,11 females(the mean of age:19.73;standard deviation:1.34;the mean of score:24.68,standard deviation:5.78).Both groups were tested with spatial location test(spatial location memory test),mental rotation test(test of mental rotation ability in 3-D space)and synonym judgment task(semantic understanding task),in the same time,their EEG data will be recorded.The results of behavioral data(accuracy?reaction time)show no significant differences between the two groups of the left and right brain-dominated cognitive styles.However,significant group differences were found in brain activation patterns during those tests.Specifically,even though in the spatial task with different difficulty,the two groups both show a dependence on the function of right-hemisphere,but only the right brain-dominated cognitive style subjects show a high dependence on the function of right-hemisphere.And the subjects in the two groups possibly use a naming strategy which depended on temporal lobe function to operate.According to the two groups of subjects'brain activation pattern in language information processing,it was found that the subjects with left brain-dominated show an obvious left brain dominant tendency when processing verbal information while the subjects with right brain-dominated show a bilateral activation pattern.At the same time,it is found that the processing of concrete words depends on synchronous processing of left and right hemisphere,while the processing of words depend on left hemisphere function.In addition,both the abstract word and the concrete word depend more on the activation of the posterior cerebral cortex(mainly the temporal lobe area).In general,we suppose that there are differences in brain activation patterns and cognitive strategies between left-brain-dominated cognitive style subjects and right-brain-dominated cognitive style subjects.The results confirm the classification of these two cognitive styles from the perspective of brain function.Also,it is further indicated that the left-brain-dominated cognitive style had a cross-task consistency on the left-brain function and the right-brain-dominated cognitive style on the right-brain function,and to some extent hemisphericity also shows a tendency to be regulated by the nature of the task.