REALLY?

If someone is right-handed, will his right foot also be dominant? Will his right eye be his dominant eye?

Preference for one hand or foot over the other, known as laterality, has been studied in humans chiefly as it relates to language development.

Most people are right-handed, the right side of the body being controlled by the left side of the cerebral hemisphere, which is usually the language center.

A fairly strong link between hand preference and foot preference has been observed.

As for eye preference, any correlation is much more ambiguous.

For example, a recent study in India, reported in The International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Research, found no significant relationship between dominant eye and dominant hand.

A 1983 study in The International Journal of Neuroscience, involving 7,364 children, found that only about 40 percent showed consistent lateral preferences of hand, eye and foot; about 37 percent favored the right side and about 3 percent the left. As for the other 60 percent, they showed 10 preference patterns.

Preferences for the hand and foot are usually easy to observe. A right-foot-dominant person tends to kick a ball with his right foot, for instance.

To determine eye preference, the Miles test is often used. The subject is asked to focus with both eyes on an object framed within a triangle created by holding the hands at arm’s length with the thumbs overlapped and the fingers overlapped. If the left eye is then closed and the object remains visible within the frame, the subject is right-eyed.

ActiveStyle, Pages 27 on 12/23/2013

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