Lefties Get It Right When Hearing Tool Sounds

@article{Lewis2006LeftiesGI,
  title={Lefties Get It Right When Hearing Tool Sounds},
  author={JamesW. Lewis and Raymond E. Phinney and Julie A. Brefczynski-Lewis and Edgar A. DeYoe},
  journal={Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience},
  year={2006},
  volume={18},
  pages={1314-1330}
}
Our ability to manipulate and understand the use of a wide range of tools is a feature that sets humans apart from other animals. In right-handers, we previously reported that hearing hand-manipulated tool sounds preferentially activates a left hemisphere network of motor-related brain regions hypothesized to be related to handedness. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we compared cortical activation in strongly right-handed versus left-handed listeners categorizing tool sounds… 
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77 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
3
Background Citations
35
Methods Citations
4
Results Citations
7

77 Citations

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These findings indicate that hearing sounds depicting familiar hand-object interactions elicit different patterns of activity in SI, despite the complete absence of tactile stimulation, and cross-modal connections from audition to SI transmit content-specific information about sounds depictingamiliar hand- object interactions.
Sinistrals are rarely “right”: evidence from tool-affordance processing in visual half-field paradigms
TLDR
The results indicate that in subjects with atypically organized cognitive skills, tool-related processes are not just mirror reversed, and call for particular caution in neurorehabilitation directed at left-handed individuals.
Tool use, communicative gesture and cerebral asymmetries in the modern human brain
  • S. Frey
  • Psychology, Biology
    Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
  • 2008
TLDR
It is argued here that the ways in which humans skilfully use tools and other manipulable artefacts is possible owing to adaptations that integrate sensory–motor and cognitive processes.
Left handedness does not extend to visually guided precision grasping
TLDR
The results show that handedness in left handers does not extend to precision grasp and suggest that right handedness for visuomotor control may reflect a universal left-hemisphere specialization for this class of behaviour.
Cortical Networks Related to Human Use of Tools
  • JamesW. Lewis
  • Psychology, Biology
    The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry
  • 2006
TLDR
This review compares and summarizes results from 64 paradigms published over the past decade that have examined cortical regions associated with tool use skills and tool knowledge and revealed cortical networks in both hemispheres, though with a clear left hemisphere bias.
Divergent Human Cortical Regions for Processing Distinct Acoustic-Semantic Categories of Natural Sounds: Animal Action Sounds vs. Vocalizations
TLDR
A neurobiological theoretical framework for how the mammalian brain may be fundamentally organized to process acoustically and acoustic-semantically distinct categories of ethologically valid, real-world sounds is supported.
Crinkling and crumpling: An auditory fMRI study of material properties
Cortical network differences in the sighted versus early blind for recognition of human‐produced action sounds
TLDR
Compared brain regions activated in congenitally blind versus sighted listeners in response to hearing a wide range of recognizable human‐produced action sounds, it is shown that recognized human action sounds commonly evoked activity in both groups along most of the left pSTS/pMTG complex, though with relatively greater activity by the blind group.
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References

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Left handedness does not extend to visually guided precision grasping
TLDR
The results show that handedness in left handers does not extend to precision grasp and suggest that right handedness for visuomotor control may reflect a universal left-hemisphere specialization for this class of behaviour.
Cortical Networks Related to Human Use of Tools
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  • Psychology, Biology
    The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry
  • 2006
TLDR
This review compares and summarizes results from 64 paradigms published over the past decade that have examined cortical regions associated with tool use skills and tool knowledge and revealed cortical networks in both hemispheres, though with a clear left hemisphere bias.
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