Is a color processed with a right hemispheric dominance?

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It has been known that the left hemisphere is dominant in verbal and analystic processing, while the right hemisphere is dominant in emotional and holistic processing. The hemispheric difference in color signal processing is not well documented. We have been studied this matter using a reaction time task with a visual stimuli presented either in the right or the left visual field, and with a response by the ipsilateral hand. We found that significant hemispheric asymmetry with the right dominance in the color processing. No such asymmetry was obtained when we tested using achromatic stimuli, or when we presented color stimuli at the center of the visual field. These results strongly suggested that color processing was differentially processed in the both hemisphere with the right hemisphere dominance. The present study explored further the hemisphere dominance in color processing by investigating the asymmetry in color discrimination. Because discrimination processing based on analystic processing, it may lead to the left hemispheric dominance. On the other hand, the color discrimination might be processed with the right hemispheric dominance, as in the case of color detection, which we obtained previously. We investigated this matter in two tasks, one with language cues for the color discrimination and the other without language cues. In both case the discrimination task resulted in the left hemispheric dominance, showing that the color processing has hemispheric asymmetry ; the color detection is processed more rapidly in the right hemisphere while the color discrimination is processed with a left hemispheric dominance.