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Srpski arhiv za celokupno lekarstvo 2016 Volume 144, Issue 5-6, Pages: 339-344
https://doi.org/10.2298/SARH1606339M
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Laterality in living beings, hand dominance, and cerebral lateralization

Milenković Sanja (School of Medicine, Institute for Hygiene with Medical Ecology, Belgrade)
Paunović Katarina ORCID iD icon (School of Medicine, Institute for Hygiene with Medical Ecology, Belgrade)
Kocijančić Dušica (Clinical Center of Serbia, Clinic for Gynecology and Obstetrics, Belgrade)

To date, lateralization in living beings is a phenomenon almost mythologically unexplored. Scientists have proved that lateralization is not exclusively a human feature. Investigations in molecular biology, protein structure, mobility of bacteria, and intracellular lateralization in ciliates, shows important and universal nature of lateralization in living systems. Dominant lateralization implies the appearance of a dominant extremity, or a dominant sense during the performance of complex psychomotor activities. Hand dominance is usually defined as a tendency to use one hand rather than another to perform most activities and this is considered to be the most obvious example of cerebral lateralization and exclusive characteristic of humans. However, there are some exceptions in other species. The dominant hand is able to perform more complex and subtle manual tasks than the non-dominant hand, and this behavioral superiority is the absolute result of additional cerebral support. The asymmetry of brain organization was confirmed in rats, chimpanzees, dogs and birds, some fishes and lizards. The relationships between hand dominance with brain structure and function remain far from clear. For a long time, lateralization was considered unique to humans, but recently it has become clear that lateralization is a fundamental characteristic of the organization of brain and behavior in all vertebrates. It has been questioned to what extent lateralization in humans and other vertebrates may be comparable.

Keywords: laterality, handedness, cerebral dominance

Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 41020 i br. 175078