Abstract
The author presents his perspective on the character of science, development, and handedness and relates these to his investigations of the early development of handedness. After presenting some ideas on what hemispheric specialization of function might mean for neural processing and how handedness should be assessed, the neuroscience of control of the arms/hands and interhemispheric communication and coordination are examined for how developmental processes can affect these mechanisms. The author’s work on the development of early handedness is reviewed and placed within a context of cascading events in which different forms of handedness emerge from earlier forms but not in a deterministic manner. This approach supports a continuous rather than categorical distribution of handedness and accounts for the predominance of right-handedness while maintaining a minority of left-handedness. Finally, the relation of the development of handedness to the development of several language and cognitive skills is examined.
Highlights
Symmetry 2021, 13, 992. https://There is a general consensus among neuroscientists that the human left and right hemispheres of the brain have different perceptual, motor, emotional, and cognitive functions with the most distinctive difference of a left-hemisphere predominance in praxis and language functions [1]
At the time, the assumption was that hemispheric specialization of function derived from the hemispheric specialization of neuroanatomical circuits supposedly controlled by genes during development
After decades of research using the “development from” approach, I proposed that the trajectory of handedness development during infancy [24] reflects a complex cascade of contingencies involving prenatally influenced congenital postural asymmetries that contribute to the establishment of early infant sensorimotor asymmetries of arm and hand actions (Figure 2)
Summary
There is a general consensus among neuroscientists that the human left and right hemispheres of the brain have different perceptual, motor, emotional, and cognitive functions with the most distinctive difference of a left-hemisphere predominance in praxis (e.g., gestures and tool use) and language (speech and comprehension) functions [1]. Without examining the literature on the early development of handedness, the authors consider the acquisition of writing skills (in school-aged children) to be the only “early” developmental experience that could have affected the structure and functioning of the adult brain. They assume that development is a process of the interaction between nature and nurture factors in which the influences of each can be readily identified by specific neural structural and functional consequences. There are several excellent comprehensive accounts available (e.g., [29,30,31]) that I highly recommend
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