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International Workshop on Attention in Cognitive Systems

WAPCV 2007: Attention in Cognitive Systems. Theories and Systems from an Interdisciplinary Viewpoint pp 367–380Cite as

Differences and Interactions Between Cerebral Hemispheres When Processing Ambiguous Words

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4840))

Abstract

It is well known that the brain (especially the cortex) is structurally separable into two hemispheres. Many neuropsychological studies show that the process of ambiguity resolution requires the intact functioning of both cerebral hemispheres. Moreover, these studies suggest that while the Left Hemisphere (LH) quickly selects one alternative, the Right Hemisphere (RH) maintains alternate meanings. However, these hemispheres are connected through the corpus callosum and presumably the exchange of information is useful. In addition, many works show that the Left Hemisphere (LH) is more influenced by the phonological aspect of written words whereas lexical processing in the Right Hemisphere (RH) is more sensitive to visual form.This distinction suggests that the interconnections between the hemispheres may be used to strengthen or correct incorrect interpretations by one hemisphere. We test this hypothesis by (I) postulating that in the Left Hemisphere (LH) orthography, phonology and semantics are interconnected while (II) the Right Hemisphere (RH), phonology is not connected directly to orthography and hence its influence must be mitigated by semantical processing (III) seeing if corrections in ambiguous word processing can be aided by information in the other hemisphere. We investigate this by complementary human psychophysical experiments and by dual (one RH and one LH) computational neural network model architecturally modified from Kawamoto’s (1993) model to follow our hypothesis. Since the different models have different rates of convergence, we test (III) by halting processing, and using an analogue to priming to compare the rate of convergence to a corrected semantics in the LH working alone and working with information obtained from the RH at the same point in processing. In this paper we present results of the computational model and show that (I) the results obtained from the two hemispheres separately are analogous to the human experiments and (II) the use of the RH information does indeed help such corrections.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making And Department of Computer Science University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel

    Orna Peleg, Zohar Eviatar, Hananel Hazan & Larry Manevitz

Authors
  1. Orna Peleg
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  2. Zohar Eviatar
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  3. Hananel Hazan
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  4. Larry Manevitz
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Joanneum Research, Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, Computational Perception Group,, Institute of Digital Image Processing, Wastiangasse 6, 8010, Graz, Austria

    Lucas Paletta

  2. Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AIS), Autonomous Robots Department, Fraunhofer Institute, Schloss Birlinghoven, 53754, Sankt Augustin, Germany

    Erich Rome

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Peleg, O., Eviatar, Z., Hazan, H., Manevitz, L. (2007). Differences and Interactions Between Cerebral Hemispheres When Processing Ambiguous Words. In: Paletta, L., Rome, E. (eds) Attention in Cognitive Systems. Theories and Systems from an Interdisciplinary Viewpoint. WAPCV 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4840. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77343-6_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77343-6_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-77342-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-77343-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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