The Role of Verbal Labels in the Judgment of Orientation and Location

In an earlier study it was found that judgments of right—left orientations and locations were more difficult than judgments of up—down only when spatial words were used in the tasks. Experiments are reported in which pictures of many objects were presented to eliminate the possibility that subjects in previous studies had used strategies specific to single-stimulus tasks. In experiment 1, right—left orientations were judged more slowly than up—down orientations both when the spatial words were used and when arbitrary letters replaced the spatial words. In experiment 2, judgments of the right—left locations of pictures took longer than judgments of their up—down locations only when spatial words were used in the task; the right—left difficulty was eliminated when arbitrary letters replaced the words. The differential effect of words and letters in location judgments seems to be due to the different coding strategies adopted by subjects under the two conditions. It is concluded that a right—left difficulty does not depend on the use of spatial terms: word and letter conditions yield different results only when the task permits different judgments to be made under the two conditions.