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    Social environment elicits lateralized navigational paths in two populations of typically developing children

    Forrester, Gillian and Crawley, M. and Palmer, C. (2014) Social environment elicits lateralized navigational paths in two populations of typically developing children. Brain and Cognition 91 , pp. 21-27. ISSN 0278-2626.

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    Abstract

    The current study provides the first evidence of human lateralized navigation of a social space within a naturalistic environment. We employed a quantitative, observational approach and report on a detailed set of nearly 700 independent navigational routes from two separate child populations consisting of over 300 typically developing children, aged five to fourteen years. The navigational path was considered across the sagittal plane (left, right) around three distinct target types (peer, adult and object). Both child populations expressed a significant bias for choosing a rightward navigational path around a human tar- get (e.g. peer, adult) and no lateral preference for navigation around fixed, inanimate objects. A rightward navigational path provides an advantage for the left visual field and the right hemisphere, facilitating both the production and perception of social-emotion stimuli. The findings are consistent with evidence from studies of non-human animal species demonstrating that the social environment elicits predictable lateralized behavior, and support an early evolutionary delineation of functional processing by the two hemispheres.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Laterality, Cerebral lateralization, Social environment, Children
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 14 Nov 2016 11:12
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:27
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/16690

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