Individual Differences in Ambiguous-Figure Perception: Degree of Handedness and Interhemispheric Interaction

Research has shown that persons with strong right-hand preference (i.e., who report using their dominant hand for all manual activities) display a decreased tendency to update bodily and conceptual representations, possibly arising from decreased interaction between the left and right cerebral hemispheres. Current experiments extend these findings to the domain of perceptual representations. In experiments 1 and 2, strong right-handedness was associated with a decreased ability to update perceptual representations in response to gradually changing perceptual input. In experiment 3, strong right-handedness was associated with lower spontaneous reversal rates during the extended viewing of ambiguous figures, and experiment 4 ruled out an explanation in terms of response bias.