Left hand advantage in a self-face recognition task

Subjects were exposed to pictures of self and others (e.g., friend, strange r, and famous people) to determine if there was an advantage in reaction ti me and accuracy in identifying the self. It was found that upright and inve rted self-faces were identified more rapidly than non-self faces when subje cts responded with their left hand, which in other tasks has corresponded w ith contralateral hemispheric dominance. These data suggest that self-recog nition may be correlated with neural activity in the right hemisphere, and that the differences observed may not be unique to self-face recognition. T hese results are in agreement with previous research indicating that self-d irected awareness is correlated with right prefrontal activity. (C) 1999 El sevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.