Split-Brain Observation Report

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1. This experiment compared the spatial selective attention between “neurologically normal young adults” and split-brain subjects by measuring response times when presented unilateral and bilateral visual arrays.
2. The purpose for this experiment was to gather information about spatial selective attention, and to investigate whether “an independent focus of attention is deployed by each surgically separated hemisphere in a visual search task, such that bilateral stimulus arrays can be scanned at a faster rate by split brain subjects than by neurologically normal control subjects” (CITATION). One central question this study sought to answer was whether visual search “can be performed in parallel by the right and left hemispheres after commissurotomy”
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The results of this experiment found that control group responded to the visual stimuli faster than split-brain subjects in both bilateral and unilateral array trials when the set size of visual stimuli was six or fewer. The control group is projected to continue to be more efficient than the experimental group in the unilateral array responses. However, upon reaching a visual stimuli size of eight, the control and experimental groups’ scores are nearly identical. Indicated by the tend of the slopes of both groups, the split-brain subjects are projected to have faster reaction times than the control group for bilateral visual arrays with set sizes larger than eight. Additionally, for the split-brain patients, the slope between their results on the unilateral and bilateral stimuli trials is nearly a two-to-one ratio. This experiment also found that the “scanning of visual arrays is conducted independently in the disconnected hemispheres of split-brain patients.”
4. These findings suggest that each hemisphere can search its corresponding hemifield independently of the other hemisphere” (CITATION). Further, since the split-brain subjects are projected to have faster response times when presented with bilateral stimulus with a set size larger than eight, this indicates that split-brain subjects are capable splitting their attentional focus while the neurologically normal control group is

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