AsianScientist (Jun. 10, 2011) – Left-handed people consistently perform worse than right-handed people in measures of cognitive ability, or IQ, with the ‘level of disability’ equivalent to being prematurely born.
This is the finding of a recent study led by Professor Mike Nicholls, newly-appointed Director of the Brain and Cognition Laboratory in Flinders University’s School of Psychology.
“Our study of members of the same family confirms that left-handed children will do worse than their right-handed siblings,” he said.
Nicholls, who is himself left-handed, analyzed large databases of handedness and other attributes in people across Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. He said handedness is tied to left/right asymmetries in the brain, or laterality – a major research focus of the laboratory.
“Left and right could so easily be the same in humans and in some animal species it is the same. In humans, though, there seems to be this large specialization of the two sides of the brain,” he said. “It is most likely related to squeezing as many eggs as possible into one basket.”
Spatial attention is the second research focus of the laboratory team. Here, they are interested in studying how the general population tends to pay more attention to the left-hand side of an object than the right.
This bias manifests itself as a tendency to deviate to the right in activities from steering a wheelchair to walking and even goal-kicking. For example, when footballers aim for the midpoint between two posts, they tend to kick slightly to the right of middle.
Nicholls said the ultimate goal of his research is to develop remedial techniques for people with neurological problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and brain damage.
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Source: Flinders University.
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