Publication Cover
Laterality
Asymmetries of Brain, Behaviour, and Cognition
Volume 1, 1996 - Issue 1
310
Views
120
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Original Articles

Handedness and Eye-dominance: A Meta-analysis of Their Relationship

Pages 5-34 | Published online: 15 Oct 2010
 

Abstract

About one in ten people is left-handed and one in three is left-eyed. The extent of the association of handedness and eyedness is unclear, as some eyedness measures are potentially contaminated by measures of handedness. A meta-analysis of hand-eye concordance in 54,087 subjects from 54 populations, found that concordance was 2.69 × greater in questionnaire rather than performance studies, 1.95 × greater in studies using unimanual monocular performance measures, and 6.29 × greater in studies using non-sighting measures of eye-dominance. In the remaining studies, which seemed to show no evidence of bias, the odds-ratio for hand-eye concordance was 2.53 ×; in a population with 9.25% left-handedness and 36.53% left-eyedness, 34.43% of right-handers and 57.14% of left-handers are left-eyed. This pattern of hand-eye association poses problems for genetic models of cerebral lateralisation, which must invoke pleiotropic alleles at a single locus or epistatic interactions between multiple loci. There was no evidence that the incidence of eyedness, or the association between eyedness and handedness, differed between the sexes.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.