Laterality entering the next decade - The 25th anniversary of a journal devoted to asymmetries of brain, behaviour and cognition.

Abstract

In 1996, Phil Bryden, Mike Corballis, and Chris McManus released the first issue of Laterality. These founding editors pointed out in their editorial how surprisingly long it took to have a journal devoted entirely to laterality, its unanswered questions and wide-ranging problems. They mentioned leftright asymmetries inside sub-atomic structures, the pharmacology of chiral molecules, anatomical asymmetries of the viscera, Broca’s discovery of the left-brain dominance in language production, and the relation of these to handedness and other lateralised functions. In the first issue of Laterality, the founding editors published a figure illustrating the rapid growth of publications indexed broadly under the heading “laterality” since 1960. Although – as predicted by the founding editors – Experimental Psychology predominated in Laterality, researchers from other academic disciplines, such as Anthropology, Behavioural Biology, Clinical Neurology, Linguistics, Neurosciences, Psychiatry, Sport Sciences, and others were important contributors. Laterality research today explicitly includes findings from both human and non-human species (e.g., see Laterality Issues 1 and 2 published in 2021). Therefore, and unsurprisingly, a bibliometric analysis a quarter of a century after the first release of Laterality shows that the interest in laterality is still growing as indicated by the continuing rise in publication numbers in Laterality and other journals (Figure 1). The papers published in the first issue of Laterality investigated the relationship between handedness and eye-dominance (Bourassa, 1996), attempts to switch the writing hand (Porac, 1996), handedness in professional cricket players (Edwards & Beaton, 1996), and the magnitude of laterality effects and sex differences in functional asymmetries (Voyer, 1996), all topics still of interest today, as shown by recent papers published in Laterality on handedness (e.g., Bruckert, Thompson, Watkins, Bishop, & Woodhead, 2021; Papadatou-Pastou et al., 2021; Tzourio-Mazoyer, Labache, Zago, Hesling, & Mazoyer, 2021) and cognitive sex differences (e.g., Hirnstein, Hugdahl, & Hausmann, 2019). One-hundred and twenty-eight issues later, Laterality celebrates its 25th anniversary with a special Issue on “Laterality research entering the next