Study of hemispheric specialization was first done on patient W.J. He was a split-brain patient that had his corpus callosum severed. Corpus callosum is a bundle of axons that link the right and the left hemisphere together and pass along information back and forth, if it were completely severed, there would not be any communication at all between the two hemispheres. In Gazzaniga and colleagues' (2009) article, he talked about the researches conducted to find how the two hemispheres worked together. Each eye have split into two visual fields, one on the right and one on the left. Both of the right visual fields go to the left of the visual cortex and the right visual field of the left eye can go there via optic chiasm. The same thing can be applied to the left visual fields. They both go to the visual cortex on the right hemisphere. Split-brain patients can still function because even if the corpus callosum was severed and the optic chiasm can't transport signals, there is still one eye of the correct visual field that goes to the corresponding visual cortex. Researches have determined from split-brain patients and divided visual fields that the left hemisphere has more advantage towards speech, language and details processing while the right hemisphere is better at face recognition, visuospatial processing and looking at generalized features. They have done so in split-brain patients where they were presented a word on the left visual field, the patients would not be able to say it or would report didn't see anything. The split-brain patients could not transfer any information between the two hemispheres, it gave the researchers an advantage at looking at how each hemisphere would react to different tasks and sort out which hemisphere would be better at performing certain tasks (Gazzaniga et al, 2009). The current experiment used the idea of hemispheric specialization to study how the right hemisphere could have an advantage towards shape and pattern recognition.
