Turning the other lobe:: Directional biases in brain diagrams

Richard Wiseman; Adrian M. Owen

doi:10.1177/2041669517707769

Turning the other lobe: Directional biases in brain diagrams

Richard Wiseman, Adrian M. Owen

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Abstract

Past research shows that in drawn or photographic portraits, people are significantly more likely to be posed facing to their right than their left. We examined whether the same type of bias exists among sagittal images of the human brain. An exhaustive search of Google images using the term 'brain sagittal view' yielded 425 images of a left or right facing brain. The direction of each image was coded and revealed that 80% of the brains were right-facing. This bias was present in images that did not contain any representation of a human head. It is argued that the effect might be aesthetic in nature, the result of the Western tradition of reading left to right or due to the facial factors that underlie the bias previously found in portraits.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-4
Number of pages	4
Journal	i-Perception
Volume	8
Issue number	3
Early online date	18 May 2017
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/2041669517707769
Publication status	Published - 1 Jun 2017

Keywords

Body perception
Cognition
Face perception
Perception

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10.1177/2041669517707769Licence: CC BY

Published Version
© 2017 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Final published version, 509 KBLicence: CC BY

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Turning the other lobe: Directional biases in brain diagrams

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