Intern. J.

Neuroscience, 113:849866, 2003

Copyright 2003 Taylor & Francis
0020-7454/03 $12.00 + .00
DOI: 10.1080/00207450390200981

LINE BISECTION TASK PERFORMANCE

AND RESTING EEG ALPHA POWER
METEHAN IEK
ERHAN NALACI
CANAN KALAYCIOGLU
^

Cognitive Neurophysiology Unit

Department of Physiology, School of Medicine
University of Ankara
Sihhiye, Ankara, Turkey
Neurologically normal subjects generally err to the left of veridical center
when performing a line bisection task, a phenomenon termed pseudoneglect.
We hypothesized that resting electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha oscillations may show relationships with attentional mechanisms and give
some clues about the underlying mechanisms of pseudoneglect. We recorded resting EEGs of 4l subjects and tested them with a paper-pencil
line bisection task. Our results showed that line bisection scores of men
(n = 18) were less biased and their performance was higher compared
to those of women (n = 20), but these differences only approached
significance. The eyes open resting EEG alpha power of women was
significantly and positively correlated with their line bisection performance. In general, significant relationships were related to the left hand
performance when the lines were presented in the left hemispace. Greater
resting alpha power was correlated with lower absolute bisection score
or, in other words, higher bisection performance. Greater alpha power
also correlated with diminished leftward bisection bias (or reduced pseudoneglect). The resting EEG alpha of men was weakly associated with
bisection performance. Results discussed in terms of Kinsbournes activation-orientation theory and Basars view on brain oscillations.
Keywords asymmetry, attention, pseudoneglect, sex difference
Received 29 November 2002.
This study was supported by TBITAK (project no: SBAG-1884). The authors are grateful to
Prof. Selma Yrkan for linguistic improvements in the manuscript.
Address correspondence to Metehan iek, Cognitive Neurophysiology Unit, Department of
Physiology, School of Medicine, University of Ankara, Sihhiye, 06100, Ankara, Turkey. E-mail:
cicek@medicine.ankara.edu.tr

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Visuospatial neglect syndrome is defined as difficulty in reporting,

responding, or orienting toward stimuli located within contralesional
hemispace where such impairment is not due to either motor or
sensory defects (Jewell & McCourt, 2000). Line bisection is one of
the most frequently used instruments to study hemispatial neglect.
Left neglect patients (this form is most frequently seen) typically
bisect horizontal lines to the right of veridical center. Interestingly,
neurologically normal subjects transect horizontal lines with a leftward bias from the true center, a phenomenon referred to as pseudoneglect (Bowers & Heilman, 1980). Although most of the studies
reported a leftward bisection error, there are inconsistencies in the
literature causing difficulties while trying to clarify the brain mechanisms
underlying this asymmetry (Jewell & McCourt, 2000). Neglect and
pseudoneglect are often discussed as having a common underlying
attentional asymmetry. Understanding pseudoneglect mechanisms will
improve our knowledge about the neural substrates of the spatial
allocation of attention and may contribute to understanding of the
etiology and consequences of visuospatial neglect syndrome.
Roig and Cicero (1994) found that mens line bisection task performance indicates a significantly greater left-sided bias than womens,
whereas Wolfe (1923) reports the contrary. Hausmann et al. (2002)
reported hand use and sex interaction in line bisection, with women
showing the left bias to a similar extent with both hands while men
show the bias predominantly with the left hand. At least it is clear
that any pseudoneglect study should take in to account the sex effect.
Resting posterior electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha asymmetry
was suggested to predict cognitive styles and correlate with cognitive performance (Davidson, 1988; Ray et al., 1981). Furst (1976)
reported a significant correlation between the subjects resting alpha
asymmetry and visuospatial task performance. OBoyle et al. (1991)
reported that alpha power at rest in the right hemisphere of a mathematically gifted group of students proved significantly greater when
compared to those of a control group of average ability. In contrast,
resting asymmetries in anterior EEG alpha power were suggested to
predict affective reactivity (Meyers & Smith, 1987; Sutton & Davidson,
2000). In general, EEG alpha activity modulations are related to
attentional and/or cognitive modulations (Glass, 1984; Klimesch et
al., 1994; Ray & Cole, 1985).

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851

Marrufo et al. (2001) reported long-lasting tonic modulation of

EEG alpha and beta oscillations by spatial attention. Both bands
showed a widespread topographical effect and the authors suggested
that this might imply a global arousal effect. Based on their experimental results on the relation between EEG and frequency characteristics, Basar (1992) suggested that if a neural population is able
to show spontaneous activity in a given frequency range, then this
structure can be brought to a state of excitement in the same frequency range to sensory stimuli. Basar et al. (1997) define alpha
networks that are distributed in the brain in a diffuse way. According to Basars view, this distributed brain EEG alpha activity during
rest might have a relationship with cognitive task related alpha modulations. Based on the above-mentioned results and theories we
hypothesized that resting EEG alpha activity might serve as a background for a spatial attentional task related alpha suppression and
might be related to subsequent task performance. Supporting this
view, we have recently reported that the resting EEG alpha power
of healthy subjects was correlated with their performance in Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, a test that requires attentional processing
besides other processes (iek & Nalaci, 2001).
We aimed to contribute to the efforts on clarifying the origin of
pseudoneglect by investigating the relationships between resting
interhemispheric brain activity and this phenomenon. We also wanted
to search the relationship between resting EEG alpha power and
attentional mechanisms.

METHOD
Subjects
The subjects were 41 right-handed volunteers (22 women and 19
men), with no neurological or psychiatric disease and with normal
or corrected vision. They were aged between 1933 years of age
(mean SD = 22.8 4.3). They were not under any medication for
one week prior to the test day and they had slept well the night
before. The test date did not coincide with the menstrual or premenstrual period for the women. Handedness was quantified by the Turkish

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version of Chapman and Chapmans questionnaire (Chapman & Chapman, 1987; Nalaci et al., 2002). Due to technical problems, the resting EEG data of 3 subjects (2 women and 1 men) were not usable
and we also did not use their line bisection task (LBT) results.
Stimuli and Procedure
The stimuli were black lines 1.5 mm in thickness, printed on white
36 25.8 cm sheets of paper, each page including five lines. The
end of each line was located at 2.5 cm distance from the edge of the
paper in a randomly determined position such that there were two
or three lines in each hemispace. The lines were in ten different
lengths: 80 to 170 mm (increasing 10 mms steps). Each line length
was presented twice in a pseudorandom order, for a total of 20
lines for one hemispace so the subjects bisected 40 lines with each
hand. The subjects were asked to bisect the lines with just one
vertical mark using a 0.35 mm tipped pencil. The subjects were
requested to restrict any head or body movement during the test
administration. The experimenter, seated opposite the subject, placed
the papers on the table, so that the midline of the paper would be in
line with the midline of the subjects body. Half of the subjects in
each sex group started the session with the right hand and the other
half with the left hand.
The experimenter measured the distances of the bisection marks
to the left end of the lines with 0.5 mm precision. These values
were subtracted from the half of the length of related lines to obtain
bisection errors. For each subject, we calculated the mean bisection
errors and the mean of the absolute values of bisection errors. For
mean bisection errors, a negative value indicates that the transection
points are too close to the left end of the line, and a positive value
means that the marks are shifted to the right. Mean bisection errors
(MBE) and mean absolute bisection errors (MABE) were calculated
for left hand use with left hemispace presentation and right hemispace
presentation and also for right hand use with left hemispace presentation and right hemispace presentation. MBE score was used as a
marker for pseudoneglect. On the other hand MABE score can give
the precision of the subjects bisection performance.
We recorded the resting EEGs of each subject before administer-

Line Bisection and Resting EEG

853

ing the LBT. Subjects sat in a reclining chair in a sound and electromagnetically isolated, dimly illuminated room. EEG was recorded
while the subject was resting with eyes closed (EC) and eyes open
(EO). They were required to rest and try not to think of any specific
subject. They were also asked to avoid any movement and sleeping.
We reported significant relationship between task performance
and EEG alpha power both for EC and EO conditions in our previous study so in the present experiment we included both conditions
(iek & Nalaci, 2001).
EEG Acquisition and Analysis
EEG was recorded continuously from O1, O2, P3, P4, T5, T6, C3,
C4, F3, F4, F7, and F8 electrode sites with an electrocap (ECI electrocap). Cz was used as reference and Fpz as ground. Fp1 and Fp2
were used to monitor eye artifacts but the data from these channels
were not included in spectral power estimates. Electrode impedances were kept below 5 kohm and the differences between homologue electrode pairs were less than 1 kohm. EEG was amplified
and digitized by a 16-channel Synamps amplifier (Neurosoft Inc.) at
100 Hz sampling rate (bandpass = 1 and 30 Hz; gain = 30,000). For
the first 16 subjects, 2 min of artifact-free EEG was recorded for
each condition. A preanalysis showed that because of artifacts we
could not use the data of two subjects so we recorded 4 min of
resting EEG after the 17th subject.
We obtained 2.56-s epochs from the recorded continuous EEG in
off-line analysis. EEG segments contaminated with movement artifacts and any other epochs containing EEG amplitudes with greater
than +40 V or less than 40 V at FP1, FP2, F7, and F8 electrode
sites were rejected for all channels. For both experimental conditions we required 10 artifact-free epochs to continue for further
analysis. With these criteria, the data of two women and one man
were excluded from the analysis. Additionally, we could not use the
eyes-closed data of two and eyes-open data of one woman for analysis.
The mean numbers of epochs (mean SD) accepted for analysis
were 31.9 20.7 for EO and 32.8 19.7 for EC condition. The
mean numbers (mean SD) of rejected epochs were 50 23.5 for
EO and 48.2 26.4 for EC condition.

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Averaged spectral powers (ASP) were computed for EO and EC

conditions by use of a Fast Fourier Transform and a Cosine window
with 10% window length. The sums of ASPs were calculated in the
following frequency bands: alpha-1 (8.210.9 Hz) and alpha-2 (11.3
13.3 Hz). To normalize data, logarithmic transformation was applied to all ASP values.
Statistical Analysis
EEG and LBT data of 20 women and 18 men were statistically
analyzed. Repeated measures of ANOVA were performed on MBE
and MABE with sex as the between-subjects factor, and performing
hand and presentation hemispace as the within-subjects factors. MBE
scores were compared with zero to test the significance of neglect
with paired samples t-test.
EEG data were also subjected to repeated ANOVA measures.
The within-subjects factors were Hemisphere, Region (frontal 1:
F7-F8, frontal 2: F3-F4, central, parietal, temporal, occipital), Task
(EO, EC), and Band (alpha-1, alpha-2). Sex was again the betweensubjects factor. The Greenhouse-Geisser adjustment was applied to
the degrees of freedom for all analyses.
The Pearsons r correlation coefficients were calculated between
log transformed ASP values and the LBT performance parameters
for two resting conditions, and for men and women separately.

RESULTS
Line Bisection Task
Table 1 shows the MBE and MABE scores of women and men
obtained from the administration of the LBT. Results of the left and
the right hand performance were given separately for the left and
the right hemispace presentation. MBE scores were different from
zero for left hemispace presentations for men and women (p < .01),
indicating a significant left-sided bias (or pseudoneglect). On the
other hand, in the right hemispace, only the mens score with right
hand use deviated significantly to the right (p < .05). Left hand

Line Bisection and Resting EEG

855

TABLE 1. Mean bisection errors and mean absolute bisection errors (mean SD in
millimeters) of women (n = 20) and men (n = 18) obtained from the Line Bisection
Task a
Left Hand

MBE
Women
Men
MABE
Women
Men

Right Hand

Left hemispace

Right hemispace

Left hemispace

Right hemispace

1.68 (1.91)**
1.17 (1.65)**

0.49 (2.51)
0.71 (1.62)

1.86 (2.30)**
1.09 (1.25)**

0.12 (2.15)
1.22 (1.95)*

2.66 (1.09)
2.14 (0.86)

2.71 (1.08)
2.33 (0.75)

3.06 (1.31)
2.22 (0.77)

2.42 (0.92)
2.57 (0.92)

MBE = mean bisection error; MABE = mean absolute bisection error. Negative MBE scores represent
leftward transection bias from the true center and positive values indicate rightward bias.
a
Standard deviations presented in parentheses.
*p < .05, **p < .01, t-test comparisons with 0 were performed only for MBE scores to test the significance of the biases.

performance of men in the right hemispace approached significance

(p < .08).
The ANOVA performed on the MBE scores revealed a main
effect of hemispace (F(1,37) = 35.81, p < .001). Subjects biased to
the left in the left hemispace (mean = 1.45, SE = 0.26); however,
they showed right-sided bias in the right hemispace (mean = 0.39,
SE = 0.30).
The main effect of sex approached significance (F(1,37) = 3.6,
p < .07). Women were biased leftward (mean = 0.98, SE = 0.32),
while men showed a minimal bias (mean = 0.08, SE = 0.34). No
other factors were significant and there was no significant interaction for MBE scores.
The ANOVA performed on MABE scores showed an interaction
of hemispace and sex that approached significance (F(1,37) = 3.4,
p < .08). MABE score in women was higher for the left hemispace
presentation, indicating a lower bisection performance (mean = 2.86,
SE = 0.19), when compared with men (mean = 2.18, SE = 0.20).
The right hemispace performances of the two groups were similar
(for women, mean = 2.56, SE = 0.18; for men, mean = 2.45, SE =
0.19). All other interactions were not significant.
The main effect of sex approached significance for MABE scores
also (F(1,37) = 3.3, p < .08). MABE score in men was lower,

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TABLE 2. Overall mean averaged spectral powers of subjects during resting conditionsa
Eyes open
Band/
location
Alpha-1
Frontal-1
Frontal-2
Central
Temporal
Parietal
Occipital
Alpha-2
Frontal-1
Frontal-2
Central
Temporal
Parietal
Occipital

Left hemisphere

Eyes closed

Right hemisphere

11.97
7.53
6.16
24.5
19.67
29.24

(13.07)
(10.74)
(6.77)
(27.92)
(30.22)
(33.13)

12.07
7.43
5.79
26.47
22.09
33.13

(12.8)
(10.26)
(5.8)
(30.01)
(32.7)
(38.58)

4.46
2.55
3.81
8.8
7.55
10.45

(3.59)
(2.06)
(4.72)
(7.1)
(8.34)
(8.87)

4.62
2.73
3.57
10.09
8.34
11.14

(3.14)
(2.15)
(4.47)
(8.18)
(8.52)
(8.24)

Left hemisphere Right hemisphere

23.95
16.39
10.23
106.55
71.4
168.48

(24.13)
(20.83)
(11.13)
(128.37)
(80.45)
(208.43)

6.05 (4.63)
3.54 (2.36)
4.15 (4.99)
16.64 (11.89)
14.7 (13.01)
26.72 (23.66)

26.4
16.94
10.48
124.07
85.05
183.84

(24.43)
(19.10)
(8.92)
(127.8)
(98.68)
(205.22)

6.62 (4.29)
3.77 (2.66)
4.08 (4.26)
19.58 (15.57)
16.71 (14.11)
29.94 (26.17)

Frontal-1, F7 and F8; Frontal-2, F3 and F4.

a
Standard deviations presented in parentheses.

showing that their bisection performance was higher than that of

women (for men, mean = 2.32, SE = 0.16; for women, mean = 2.71,
SE = 0.15). There was no other significant effect of factors for
MABE scores.
Resting EEG
Overall mean ASPs of subjects are shown in Table 2 without any
transformation. On the other hand, a five-factor (hemisphere
region task band sex) analysis of variance was applied to the
log transformed EEG data. Significant main effects were obtained
from the eyes open/closed manipulation (task) and from differences
between recording sites (region).
The effect of band was significant (F(1,37) = 57.1, p < .001).
Overall mean ASP for alpha-1 band (mean = 1.16, SE = .07) was
greater than alpha-2 (mean = 0.7, SE = .07). The main effect of
hemisphere was also significant (F(1,37) = 10.3, p < .01). Overall
mean ASP during resting was greater in the right hemisphere (mean =
.96, SE = .06) when compared with the left hemisphere (mean = 0.9,
SE = 0.07). The effect of sex was not significant.

Line Bisection and Resting EEG

857

The interactions of task band (p < .01), task region (p <

.001), band region (p < .001), and task band region (p < .05)
were significant. Other interactions were not significant.
Relationship between the LBT Performance
and the EEG Activity at Rest
The Pearsons r correlation coefficients between the LBT scores
and the ASP values obtained during eyes open resting for women
are presented in Table 3. The significant relationships were mostly
related to the line presentation in the left hemispace and to the
performance with the left hand. In general, bilateral posterior EEG
alpha activity showed relationship with LBT performance.
In Figure 1 selected scattergrams show the direction of the correlations between log transformed ASPs and LBT scores and this
direction was also consistent for the other significant relationships
presented in Table 3. The correlation style was such that greater
alpha power at rest correlated with diminished leftward bisection
bias. On the other hand, greater resting alpha power correlated with
lower absolute bisection error or, in other words, more accurate
bisection performance.
Coefficients calculated for women in the eyes closed condition
were significant only for one cortical site. Alpha-1 power at C4 site
correlated positively with MBE score and negatively with MABE
score, both obtained during the left hand performance for the left
hemispace line presentations (r = .579, p < .05; r = .55, p < .05,
respectively). The direction of these correlations is the same as the
associations revealed for eyes open data.
In men the eyes open alpha-2 activity at bilateral central electrodes correlated negatively with their left hand-left hemispace MBE
score (r = .490, p < .05 for C3; r = .471, p < .05 for C4). Mens
eyes closed alpha-2 activity at bilateral central sites also correlated
negatively with their left hand-left hemispace MBE score (r =
.476, p < .05 for C3; r = .471, p < .05 for C4). The left hand-right
hemispace MBE score in men correlated positively with their eyes
closed alpha-1 power at F7 electrode (r = .493, p < .05).
The right hand-right hemispace MABE score in men correlated
positively with their eyes closed alpha-1 activity at bilateral parietal

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M. iek et al.

TABLE 3. The Pearsons r correlation coefficients for women between the log transformed
average spectral power values obtained during eyes open rest and the LBT scores
Mean bisection errors
Left hand

Mean absolute bisection errors

Right hand

Left hand

Right hand

Elect

Frq

LS

RS

LS

RS

LS

RS

LS

RS

F3

1
2

0.324
0.315

0.127
0.080

0.070
0.102

0.232
0.011

0.454
0.316

0.339
0.396

0.308
0.359

0.158
0.021

F4

1
2

0.315
0.278

0.278
0.190

0.154
0.018

0.370
0.150

0.343
0.247

0.224
0.240

0.182
0.259

0.310
0.132

F7

1
2

0.497*
0.415

0.015
0.095

0.114
0.208

0.171
0.097

0.595** 0.294
0.508* 0.343

0.393
0.296

0.001
0.042

F8

1
2

0.592** 0.137
0.456
0.040

0.049
0.168

0.270
0.045

0.474*
0.430

0.303
0.206

0.400
0.346

0.027
0.185

C3

1
2

0.427
0.358

0.071
0.057

0.031
0.055

0.126
0.145

0.402
0.211

0.271
0.155

0.414
0.49l*

0.151
0.183

C4

1
2

0.473*
0.387

0.194
0.079

0.112
0.015

0.227
0.064

0.302
0.175

0.208
0.168

0.290
0.356

0.009
0.227

T5

1
2

0.459*
0.387

0.063
0.053

0.456
0.363

0.021
0.072

0.470*
0.350

0.286
0.273

0.332
0.241

0.161
0.215

T6

1
2

0.624**
0.609**

0.077
0.102

0.133
0.409

0.095
0.046

0.540*
0.458*

0.151
0.205

0.132
0.052

0.196
0.249

P3

1
2

0.465*
0.538*

0.024
0.019

0.110
0.373

0.135
0.081

0.459*
0.361

0.219
0.261

0.193
0.207

0.093
0.167

P4

1
2

0.526*
0.547*

0.035
0.001

0.001
0.255

0.187
0.064

0.418
0.335

0.126
0.206

0.134
0.174

0.150
0.208

O1

~1
2

0.508*
0.591**

0.100
0.100

0.155
0.433

0.062
0.092

0.513*
0.486*

0.134
0.200

0.162
0.112

0.252
0.255

O2

1
2

0.489*
0.559*

0.004
0.007

0.069
0.382

0.159
0.021

0.440
0.396

0.086
0.187

0.103
0.048

0.276
0.271

Elect = electrode; Frq = frequency band; LS = left hemispace; RS = Right hemispace.

*p < .05; **p < .01.

Line Bisection and Resting EEG

859

Figure 1. Scattergrams show the relationship between the womens eyes open rest right
temporal (T6) EEG alpha-1 (8.210.9 Hz) power and their mean bisection error and mean
absolute bisection error scores obtained during line bisection performance with the left
hand in the left hemispace. Negative mean bisection error scores indicate that subjects
transected the lines with a leftward bias from the veridical center (zero in the graph)
and positive values result from rightward transections. The direction of the correlation
was such that greater alpha power at rest correlated with diminished leftward bisection
bias. On the other hand, greater alpha power was associated with lower absolute bisection error or in other words more accurate bisection performance. The Pearsons r correlation coefficients and significance level are presented in each scattergram.

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M. iek et al.

(r = .519, p < .05 for P3; r = .539, p < .05 for P4), temporal (r =
.498, p < .05 for T5; r = .544, p < .05 for T6) and occipital (r =
.525, p < .05 for O1; r = .574, p < .05 for O2) electrode sites.
The relationships observed between resting EEG data and LBT
scores in men were not as strong as those in women. However,
significant correlations revealed for the right hand-right hemispace
line presentations were pronounced for data in men. Furthermore,
their alpha power at rest correlated positively with their MABE
scores and negatively with their MBE scores, except for one relationship. In other words, contrary to the correlation style in women,
lower EEG alpha power at rest in men correlated with diminished
leftward bias and higher bisection performance.

DISCUSSION
The Effect of Sex and Presentation Hemispace on LBT
Our results revealed marginally significant effects for sex such that
the women were biased to the left (p < .07), their performance was
worse than that of the men (p < .08), and this effect was related
more to the left hemispace presentations (p < .08). As seen in Table
1, women were biased to the left in left hemispace presentations but
did not show any significant bias in the right hemispace. Besides
showing significant left-sided bias in the left hemispace, men showed
right-sided bias in right hemispace presentations (p < .05 for right
hand use, p < .08 for left hand use). These results reveal weak
evidence for a more lateralized bias for women contrary to the general view that men show more lateralized findings for cognitive
functions.
The significant effect of hemispace suggested that the subjects
were biased to the left in the left hemispace and they tended to
bisect to the right of the veridical center in the right hemispace.
Hemispace effects in these directions do not conflict with previous
reports (Milner et al., 1992; Laeng et al., 1996; McCourt & Jewell,
1999; Post et al., 2001), although conflicting results were also reported in this aspect (Nichelli et al., 1989; Mennemeier et al., 1997).
Milner et al. (1992) presented the lines 30 cm from the sagittal

Line Bisection and Resting EEG

861

body midline in the left and right hemispace presentations. They

reported that bisection errors tended to be rightward in right space,
and leftward in left space. In our study, center of the lines was
placed about 10 cm apart from the subjects body midline. The
effect of presentation hemispace revealed in this study is consistent
with the activation-orientation theory of Kinsbourne (1970, 1977).
The displacement of the line stimuli from midline causes an increase in cerebral activation within the contralateral hemisphere. A
left lateralized stimulus presentation, for instance, activates the right
hemisphere and causes an attentional bias to the left hemispace and
will result in a left-sided bisection bias.
Resting EEG
Repeated measures of ANOVA of resting EEG alpha data revealed
significant main effects and interactions, mainly as a result of eyes
open/closed manipulation and differences between recording sites
as previously reported by Intriligator and Polich (1994).
The significant main effect of band was such that overall alpha1 power was greater than alpha-2 (p < .001). This finding is in line
with the concept which suggests that the lower alpha band reflects
attention processes and the upper alpha band reflects task related
cognitive processes (Klimesch et al., 1994). It was also suggested
that different neural populations generate upper and lower alpha
bands (Lehmann & Koenig, 1997).
The effect of hemisphere was interesting such that overall alpha
power in the right hemisphere was greater than the alpha power in
the left hemisphere (p < .01). Some researchers also showed greater
alpha power in the right hemisphere of right-handed individuals
during resting (OBoyle et al., 1991; Nalaci et al., 1995). It has
been suggested that the right hemisphere represents both the left
and the right hemispace, whereas the left hemisphere represents
only the right hemispace (Hellige, 1993). Weintraub and Mesulam
(1987) reported that patients with unilateral lesions missed more
items on the side of space contralateral to the lesion and the patients
with right hemisphere damage overall missed more targets. Greater
right hemispheric EEG alpha activity at rest might support right
hemispheres pronounced role in the global attentional mechanisms.

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This baseline alpha state might create a left-sided attentional bias in

a subsequent visuospatial task and might be an important mechanism underlying pseudoneglect. An important question is that would
these EEG data be related to a subsequent nonspatial task performance? This question is open to new research but we think that
baseline EEG alpha should be related to general attentional mechanisms rather than to a specific cognitive function as verbal or spatial.
The Relationships between Resting
EEG and LBT Performance
We performed correlation analysis separately for women and men.
The correlation style of the two groups was different. In spite of
this, significant relationships revealed for women were more robust
and their data seemed to be more consistent. As presented in Table
3, the LBT performance for women was related to their bilateral
mostly posterior EEG alpha activity. The posterior cortical sites are
more related to the primary visuospatial processing of the stimulus
and these processes could be affected from the baseline alpha activity. We could guess the posterior relationships but we should also
explain why the correlations are significant only for women. Doppelmayr
et al. (2000) reported a sex difference resembling our findings such
that women showed a stronger relationship between resting EEG
and IQ-memory scores. Gur et al. (1982) reported that right-handed
females had greater increases in right hemisphere blood flow during
performance of a spatial task relative to baseline. We suggest that
womens resting brain activity represents a different attentional-arousal
mechanism compared to men and this might result in an increased
relationship between baseline EEG oscillations and subsequent task
performance.
Table 3 shows the relationships between eyes open resting alpha
activity and the LBT performance in women. The general view is
that the significant correlations were mostly related to the left hemispace
presentation and to the left hand performance. Increased pseudoneglect
was showed with left hand performance on LBT compared to the
right (McCourt, 2001; Bradshaw et al., 1986; Brodie & Pettigrew,
1996; Roig & Cicero, 1994; Scarisbrick et al., 1987). Errors were
greater when lines were presented in the left hemispace rather than

Line Bisection and Resting EEG

863

the right hemispace (Milner et al., 1992; Luh, 1995). Increased leftsided bias (pseudoneglect) with left hand performance and by left
hemispace presentations in LBT was explained by the right hemispheric specialization for visuospatial tasks. In our laboratory we
conducted a test-retest reliability study of the same LBT, which was
also used in the presented study, and showed that left hand performance scores of 42 subjects in the left hemispace presentations were
most reliable (p < .001) after 4 weeks interval (Gunes et al., 2002).
Consistency of the subjects scores in the left hemispace-left hand
performance may play a role in the style of the relationships revealed for women. In the left hemispace-left hand presentation probably
the greatest cortical activation (or alpha activity suppression) would
associate task performance among all test conditions, if we also
take into account the spatial nature of the task and its effect on
activating right hemisphere. If we discuss the results with Basars
view on the brain oscillations as referred to in the introduction, in
the left hand/left hemispace condition the background or baseline
EEG alpha would be more important than any other condition. This
could be another reason why only the left hand/left hemispace correlations showed significant relationship.
The correlations revealed a consistent general view for women as
seen in Figure 1, such that greater alpha power at rest correlated
with diminished leftward bisection bias (or pseudoneglect) on LBT.
On the other hand, greater resting alpha power correlated with higher
bisection performance. Doppelmayr et al. (2000) reported positive
and highly significant correlations between the total scores of two
different psychometric tests and the relative amount of resting EEG
alpha power. We reported previously that normal subjects resting
EEG alpha activity was correlated with their cognitive performance
on a working memory task (iek & Nalaci, 2001). Results in the
above study showed that greater alpha power during test correlated
with higher task performance. We have argued that global visuospatial
attention processes, which may be reflected by EEG alpha activity,
may lead to this relationship. The presented study confirmed our
previous findings by showing that at least for women, higher resting
EEG alpha power significantly correlated with higher performance
on a visuospatial attention task.
Hoptman and Davidson (1998) reported significant correlations

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between resting EEG activity and performance on neuropsychological tasks. They showed that lower resting alpha activity in a
scalp region correlated with higher task performance. However, their
conclusions are basically dependent on asymmetry values that can
reveal associations in a different direction from the individual electrode based powers. They also used electrode powers in correlation
analyses but they were subjected to an additional measure before
statistical analyses. In the same study, EEG recording session and
neuropsychological testing were carried out one week apart and most
importantly, they did not mention the subjects sex. These points
might underlie the difference in the style of correlations compared
to our findings.
The presented study supported the view that the resting EEG
alpha power represents a cognitive strategy, which increases or decreases cognitive performance (Tucker et al., 1985). We also showed
significant relationships between the pseudoneglect phenomenon
assessed by line bisection task and the electrophysiological data,
which give additional information about underlying mechanisms of
the pseudoneglect.

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