Lateral preferences and visual field asymmetries: appearances may have been overstated.

A review of a sample of the literature on differences in visual half field (VHF) asymmetries between left- and right-handed subjects, showed that hand preference only had a small influence on VHF superiorities. Across studies, the effect usually was in the expected direction, but within studies, it rarely reached significance. The finding was replicated in two new empirical studies, one with a task that yielded a right VHF superiority (word naming), and one with a task that returned a left VHF superiority (symmetry detection). A comparison with other lateral preferences (footedness, earedness, and eyedness) indicated that the VHF asymmetry of the word naming task was better predicted by ear preference than by hand preference; no such superiority was found for the symmetry detection task, where no lateral preference correlated significantly with the VHF asymmetry.