Lateral differences in tactile directional perception

Abstract

Between-hands differences in the tactile perception of direction were assessed in normal righthanded subjects by a unimodal tactile matching task. The left hand superiority found in earlier studies employing a crossmodal tactile-visual matching procedure was again shown in this investigation. Thus the indications of hemispheric asymmetry in the mediation of tactile-spatial performances coming from studies which have utilized tactile-visual matching tasks cannot be ascribed to the crossmodal component in these tasks. The problem posed by the occurrence of “exceptional cases” in investigations of hemispheric asymmetry of perceptual function is raised.