Cerebral lateralization.

Abstract

Recent findings suggest that cerebral laterality will not be understood in terms of simple dichotomies, such as the idea that the left hemisphere is analytic and the right holistic. Rather, hemisphere differences can be better explained in terms of relatively specific principles that extend over limited domains. For visual perception and mental imagery, the left hemisphere appears to be relatively better than the right at encoding component parts, representing visual categories, and encoding categorical spatial relations; in contrast, the right hemisphere appears to be relatively better at encoding overall patterns, representing specific instances, and encoding coordinate metric spatial relations. Recent neural network models support a hypothesis that ties together these disparate findings.