• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.29-52
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• 2006

There has been a claim that Interaction between the cerebral hemispheres could reduce the effect interfering information (Weissman & Banich, 1999). We ran three experiments to show that between-hemisphere separation of target and distractor could be more effective for reducing interference than Interaction between the hemispheres. In experiment 1, a colored box and a rotor name were presented to a single or to separate hemispheres. In experiment 2 and 3, a colored circle (distractor) was presented along with a colored box and a color name which was always printed in black. In experiment 3, a peripheral cue was presented either to the target location(66.7%) or to the distractor location(33.3%) Immediately before the presentation of stimuli. In all experiments, the participants were asked to deride whether the moaning of the color matched the rotor of the box, Ignoring the printed rotor of the word(Exp. 1), or the color of the circle(Exp. 2 & 3). There were three renditions of distractor (congruent, incongruent, and neutral) and two conditions of matching (between- and within-hemisphere matching). If interhemispheric interaction were effective for interference reduction, there should be a decrease in the interference in the between-hemisphere compared to the within-hemisphere matching condition. The results showed that there was no difference in the interference between the two matching conditions in Exp 1. In Exp 2 and in the target-cue renditions of Exp. 3, the amount of interference in the between-hemisphere condition was greater than that in the within-hemisphere condition. These findings are consistent with what we have previously reported (Sohn et al., 1996, Sohn & Lee, 2003). However, when the distractor was precued in Exp. 3, the amount of interference did not differ between the two marching conditions. These results suggest that between-hemisphere separation of target and distractor can be more effective for reducing response interference than interhemispheric communication. It implies a possible role of an interhemispheric shielding mechanism (Merola & Liederman, 1985) to prevent the transfer of task-irrelevant, harmful information across the hemispheres.