Interhemispheric resource sharing: decreasing benefits with increasing processing efficiency

Visual matches are sometimes faster when stimuli are presented across visual hemifields, compared to within-field matching. Using a cued geometric figure matching task, we investigated the influence of computational complexity vs. processing efficiency on this bilateral distribution advantage (BDA). Computational complexity was manipulated by requiring different types of match decision (physical identity vs. category identity) and processing efficiency was varied by on-task training A pronounced BDA, initially present in both tasks, completely disappeared in the course of training for the less complex and decreased for the more complex task. Thus, the size of the BDA is determined by both, processing efficiency and task complexity.