Despite overall physiological bilateral symmetry, many species exhibit lateralized biases, i.e., preferences for right- or left-oriented behavior. When approaching prey, for example, some predator species favor their right eye; some prey species respond more quickly when their left eye detects a predator. Similar behavioral asymmetries occur in humans. Most notable is right- and lefthandedness; less notable is the tendency to turn right when entering a room.
Paul Farnsworth found that more successful students tended to choose seats near the front, a little to the right. He argued that external factors such as teacher location might have affected this lateral bias. But it is now known that processing differences between the two brain hemispheres can also contribute to behavioral asymmetries.
George Karev found that when presented with a movie theater seating diagram, right-handed people were more likely than left-handed people to choose a seat on the right, facing front. But he hypothesized that, since the right hemisphere processes visuospatial and emotional information, the people who chose right-side seats did so because that would put the screen in their left visual field, optimizing information flow to the right hemisphere.
Although the right hemisphere is thought to be dominant in processing emotion, some evidence suggests that the left hemisphere plays a role. The valence model proposes that the left and right hemispheres process positive and negative emotion respectively, while the approach-withdrawal model posits that the left hemisphere processes emotion expressed in approach behavior and the right hemisphere processes emotion expressed in withdrawal behavior.
Victoria Harms and colleagues suggested that since a paper seating plan was used in the theater-seating studies by Karev and others, the exhibited preference might be due simply to handedness: people choose the same side of the paper as their favored hand. Consequently, the Harms research was designed to study choices in an actual movie theater. Also, hoping to distinguish between various explanations, they studied seating chaices for comedies (presumed to contain positive emotional content), dramas (presumed to contain negative emotional content), and documentaries (presumed to have balanced emotional content).
They found significant―though not universal―preference for seats on the right, facing front, regardless of movie genre and of handedness.
According to the passage, Karev’s hypothesis suggests which of the following about people’s choices of seating in movie theaters?
A . They are random.
B . They are seldom preceded by deliberation.
C . They depend primarily on habits formed in childhood.
D . They are primarily affected by variations in visual acuity.
E . They often function to facilitate processing of certain kinds of information,
Answer: E
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