The Impact of Expertise in Archery on the Attentional Biases of Perceptual and Representational Pseudoneglect

Turnbull & McGeorge (1998) asked a group of participants if they had bumped into anything recently and if so, on what side? Results reflected a trend towards bumping on the right. This tendency to bump into objects on the right has since been observed in a naturalistic setting (Nicholls, Loftus, Meyer, & Mattingley, 2007). But rather than an interesting quirk of statistics these studies, and many others have captured a phenomenon called pseudoneglect (Bowers and Heilman, 1980). It represents a subtle yet consistent bias in our spatial attention towards the left half of space and away from the right which results in the pattern of bumping or other lateralised errors seen in the spatial attention literature (See Jewell & McCourt, 2000). Furthermore, this bias does not just impact the perceptual sphere; it also crosses into the representational, impacting our memory for visual information (Bisiach & Luzatti, 1987). But whether this is consistent in individuals who are trained in an accuracy based sport remains unknown. The current research sought to examine perceptual and representational pseudoneglect effects in a group of expert archers compared to neurologically healthy controls. Results suggest that the attainment of expert level in archery is associated with reduced perceptual pseudoneglect. Archers showed a trend towards reduced representational pseudoneglect but this was non-significant. Results are discussed in line with theoretical frameworks of visual attention, pseudoneglect and expertise