Left Handed Research Paper

Put the pen on the paper and ask a friend or family member to handle the stopwatch app.

Once they give you the signal to start, write down the alphabet from A to Z as one word as quickly as possible.

But of the almost 32,000 people in those studies, only 3.2% were adextral — considerably lower than the rate of 10-13% in the general population.

Overall, fewer than one in five of the studies that reported handedness included any adextrals at all, suggesting that most were actively excluding these people.

Matthew Warren In a world made for right-handed people, life can sometimes be frustrating if you are among the 10% or so who are “adextral” — that is, left-handed or ambidextrous. Brain imaging researchers are systematically excluding adextrals from participating in their studies, according to an analysis of recent research papers published in top neuroimaging journals.

Yet there’s no good reason to exclude this population, say the authors — and in fact, the practice could be detrimental to research.

For example, the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (Oldfield, 1971), the most widely used handedness questionnaire, assesses 10 types of activities.

It not only asks about whether someone prefers to write or draw with the left or the right hand, but also about other behaviors, like striking a match or using a spoon.

Intriguingly, studies looking at clinical populations and children were more likely to include adextral participants than those on non-clinical and adult populations.

The authors suggest that this may be because it is harder to recruit from these populations, so researchers are more willing to include non-right-handed people.