Testing the Darwinian function of lateralization. Does separation of workload between brain hemispheres increase cognitive performance?

Abstract

Brain lateralization is a fundamental aspect of the organization of brain and behavior in the animal kingdom, begging the question about its Darwinian function. We tested the possibility that lateralization enhances cognitive performance in single- and dual-tasks. Previous studies reported mixed results on this topic and only a handful of studies have measured functional brain lateralization and performance independently and simultaneously. We therefore examined a possible positive effect of the strength and direction of lateralization on two demanding cognitive tasks: A visuospatial task (mental rotation MR), and a language task (word generation WG), executed either as a singletask or as dual-task. Participants (n = 72) performed these tasks while their single-task brain lateralization was assessed with functional Transcranial Doppler for both tasks. From these measurements we determined strength and direction of lateralization for both tasks and the individual pattern of lateralization (contralateral or ipsilateral) was derived. These factors, along with sex, were used in a GLM analysis to determine if they predicted the respective performance measure of the tasks. We found that for MR there was a significant medium effect of direction of lateralization on performance with better performance in left-lateralized (atypical) participants (partial eta squared 0.061; p = .039). After correction for outliers, there was a significant effect for strength (p = .049). For the dual-task, there was a significant positive medium effect of strength of lateralization on performance (partial eta squared 0.062; p = .038, respectively) No other association between direction or strength in either tests were found. We conclude that there is no evidence for hemispheric crowding, and that strength of lateralization may be a factor that contributes to the evolutionary selection of functional brain lateralization. Pattern of lateralization does not, explaining the large inter-individual variation in these traits.