Elizabeth (Shuxuan) Li¹ (), Marie-Luise Kieseler¹, Antonio Mello¹, Brad Duchaine¹; ¹Dartmouth College

The conventional wisdom among face perception researchers is that right-handed, neurotypical adults perform better when faces are presented in the left visual field (LVF) than the right visual field (RVF). However, our review of studies that compared performance between the two visual fields suggests that a file drawer problem may have influenced the literature. The distribution of p values in the studies was bimodal; out of 58 experiments, 27 reported a statistically significant LVF advantage and 6 found a significant RVF advantage. Only 25 experiments had p values between the significance thresholds for an LVF advantage and an RVF advantage, and these values were not clustered close to the thresholds. To investigate visual field asymmetries in face perception in an unbiased manner, we designed six tasks using the divided visual field paradigm as part of our Registered Report: Mooney face detection, two-tone face versus face parts task, sex classification, expression classification, age classification, and famous face identification. Initial data (N = 60) demonstrated that LVF minus RVF accuracy was 0.3%, 4.3%, 0.1%, -1.9%, -1.1%, and -1.2% for the six tasks. Neither accuracy nor RT significantly differed between visual fields for any test. Moreover, we found no effect of participant sex on visual field differences. These initial results suggest that the left visual field advantage is not as strong as the literature indicates, and we will further assess this hypothesis by testing 420 participants prior to VSS, as outlined in our Registered Report. Our study is an initial step toward developing an accurate understanding of visual field asymmetries (or lack thereof) in face processing, and we are confident that this goal can be achieved via pre-registered studies from multiple labs.

Acknowledgements: The project was supported by the Stamps Family Charitable Foundation, the Presidential Scholarship from Dartmouth College, and the Benjamin J. Benner '69 Undergraduate Research Fellowship.