Left-handed people more likely to be better at maths - Study

If you are left-handed you might need different scissors and struggle with the position of the mouse on most computers.

But, on the other hand, you might also be better at maths.

A new study has found a significant correlation between people's handedness and their ability to perform arithmetic tasks, but the correlation changes depending on age and gender.

Psychologists from the University of Liverpool and the University of Milan conducted a study involving 2,300 students in Italy aged between six to 17 years.

They asked them to complete a number of mathematical tasks, including simple arithmetic and problem-solving.

'This study found there is a moderate, yet significant, correlation between handedness and mathematical skill,' said Giovanni Sala, who conducted the study.

But the relationship is complicated.

'We found that the degree of handedness predicted mathematical performance in different ways, according to age, type of task, and gender,' Sala told MailOnline.

'I know it's not easy to convey the message. We ran five experiments, and in every experiment the relationship between math performance and handedness was different.

'In male adolescents, strong left-handers were the best for example.

'In children, strong left- and right-handers were the worst regardless the age.'

The participants' degree of handedness was ascertained by the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, a questionnaire that assesses how much an individual is right- or left-handed or ambidextrous.

The researchers then analysed the results in relation to the extent to which they were right- or left-handed.

The way the brain works is fundamentally connected with 'hemispheric bias' - the way different functions are associated with the left or right side of the brain.

'Handedness is an indirect expression of brain lateralisation,' Sala told MailOnline.

'For example, some - about 30 per cent - of left-handers have a more developed right hemisphere, which is related to spatial skills. So handedness may be a sign of specific brain patterns affecting cognition, which in turn affect mathematical performance.'

Some scientists believe the choice to use the left hand over the right is influenced by the way this hemispheric bias developed in the womb, when the fundamental structures of the brain were first formed.

'We also found that the degree of handedness and mathematical skills influenced by age, type of mathematical task, and gender,' said Sala.

For example, the most lateralised children, that means those who were very one-sided, either left- or right-handed, tended to under perform compared to the rest of the sample.

'However, this effect disappeared in male left-handed adolescents, who performed much better than their peers.'

'These results must not be considered definitive, but only a step towards the conception of a new and more comprehensive model of the phenomenon; A model able to account for all the discordant outcomes reported so far.'


Source: Online