A survey of more than 5000 years of art work, encompassing 1180 scorable instances of unimanual tool or weapon usage, revealed no systematic trends in hand usage. The right hand was used in an average of 93 percent of the cases, regardless of which historical era or geographic region was assessed.
The dominant eye has often been denned as the eye whose input is favored in behavioral coordinations in which only one eye can be used, the eye preferred when monocular views are discrepant, or the eye manifesting physiological or refractive superiority. Although its functional significance has not yet been ascertained, patterns of ocular dominance have been shown to be related to a large number of perceptual, performance, and clinical phenomena. The nature of these relationships has remained obscure due to the variety of alternative tests for and theoretical definitions of eye dominance.
Laterality of hand, foot, eye, and ear was measured in a sample of 1964 subjects, ranging in age from 8 to 100 years. Age trends were found, with hand, foot, and eye preference becoming more right-sided and ear preference becoming more left-sided with increasing age. Sex differences emerged in foot, eye, and ear preference but these did not systematically interact with the age variable. Several causal mechanisms are proposed but none can fully explain either the direction or the magnitude of the observed age changes. Thus, these data are most consistent with the view that the study of sidedness in humans should proceed with a consideration of a complex of underlying factors and individual difference variables.
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