Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Development of powerful brain imaging techniques has revolutionised our knowledge of the patterns of cerebral activation which underlie the performance of cognitive tasks. Particularly striking is the extent to which cognitive performance has been shown to be accompanied by motor processing even in the absence of physical movement, consistent also with considerable behavioral evidence. By definition, left-handed and right-handed people exhibit systematic differences in motor processing. It is thus possible in principle that handedness-dependent differences in patterns of motor activation may exert observable effects upon cognitive performance. New evidence suggests that this is indeed the case. It has been shown that people's handedness can significantly influence the accuracy of what they remember. Cognitive Science thus needs a chiral component. The results of experiments support the hypothesis that handedness effects are linked directly to specific patterns of motor activation, rather than indirectly to general differences in hemispheric processing.