Abstract
Determining the handedness of visually presented stimuli is thought to involve two separate stages—a rapid, implicit recognition of laterality followed by a confirmatory mental rotation of the matching hand. In two studies, we explore the role of the dominant and non-dominant hands in this process. In Experiment 1, participants judged stimulus laterality with either their left or right hand held behind their back or with both hands resting in the lap. The variation in reactions times across these conditions reveals that both hands play a role in hand laterality judgments, with the hand which is not involved in the mental rotation stage causing some interference, slowing down mental rotations and making them more accurate. While this interference occurs for both lateralities in right-handed people, it occurs for the dominant hand only in left-handers. This is likely due to left-handers’ greater reliance on the initial, visual recognition stage than on the later, mental rotation stage, particularly when judging hands from the non-dominant laterality. Participants’ own judgments of whether the stimuli were ‘self’ and ‘other’ hands in Experiment 2 suggest a difference in strategy for hands seen from an egocentric and allocentric perspective, with a combined visuo-sensorimotor strategy for the former and a visual only strategy for the latter. This result is discussed with reference to recent brain imaging research showing that the extrastriate body area distinguishes between bodies and body parts in egocentric and allocentric perspective.
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Notes
In general, reaction time data show a log normal distribution. The analyses were repeated using log-transformed reaction times; all effects remain the same and at comparable levels of significance. We report the analyses for untransformed RT in the main text for consistency with previous research.
While ANOVA is often performed on error data in psychological research, caution is advised as these data are not normally distributed and are naturally bounded between 0 and 100%. Reanalyses using arcsine square root transformed data for the right-handed group also showed a main effect of Orientation, P ~ 0, and a significant Laterality by Condition interaction, P = 0.003. For the left-handed group analyses with transformed data showed a main effect of Orientation, P ~ 0, while the main effect of Condition is not significant after transformation, P = 0.12. We report the analyses for untransformed RT in the main text for consistency with previous research.
Over the range of egocentric orientations (0°, 45°, 90°, 315°), the proportion of trials on which participants rated the hands as belonging to ‘other’ was very small, making for poor estimates of RT. Similarly, for allocentric orientations (135°, 180°, 225°), the proportion of trials on which participants rated the hands as belonging to ‘self’ was very small. As such, only the solid bars give accurate estimates of the time to rate hands as either ‘self’ or ‘other’, these judgments being naturally tied to egocentric and allocentric orientations respectively.
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We thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous version of this paper. Any errors are ours.
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Ní Choisdealbha, Á., Brady, N. & Maguinness, C. Differing roles for the dominant and non-dominant hands in the hand laterality task. Exp Brain Res 211, 73–85 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2652-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2652-9