A new study on left-handedness has shed surprising insights into its relationship with cognition, emotion recognition, and social abilities. Researchers investigated the connection between handedness and cognitive abilities while taking other asymmetries into account.
The study involved testing visitors to The Science Museum in London using two tasks: a pegboard task to determine handedness and a chimeric faces test to assess emotional lateralization. The results showed that people with moderate handedness performed better in the pegboard task, regardless of their handedness. However, those with a reversed asymmetry profile, which is characterized by an uneven distribution of left-right biases, struggled with social difficulties and exhibited higher rates of self-diagnosed autism and ADHD.
Notably, individuals with a reversed profile showed a bias for right-sided emotion recognition, whereas most people exhibit a bias for left-sided emotion recognition. This finding suggests that the way asymmetries are distributed in the brain may be more critical to cognitive abilities than handedness alone.
The study’s authors argue that future research should consider the overall asymmetry profile beyond handedness when investigating left-handedness and other abilities. The findings of this study have important implications for our understanding of the complex relationships between cognition, social abilities, and handedness.
Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-asymmetric-brain/202411/left-handedness-and-cognition-new-insights