You Just THINK That's Why You Chose to Sit There

My left-handed daughter always asks to sit on the outside of a restaurant booth so her left arm & hand have room to work. Now a researcher in Japan wants me to believe that people pick their theater seats based on handedness.

According to research by Matia Okubo reported in her article, Right Movies on the Right Seat: Laterality and Seat Choice, in the journal, Applied Cognitive Psychology, right-handed people tend to pick their seats on the right side of the theater (74% of the time).

POP QUIZ: Which side do left-handed people tend to choose?

ANSWER: Left-handed people don't seem to care where they sit.

"Why?", you ask? According to Okubo, "The finding is consistent with the idea that in right-handers, the right-hemisphere is dominant for processing visual and emotional input. By sitting to the right of the screen, the film is predominantly processed by the right-hemisphere and the suggestion is that, without necessarily realizing it, right-handers are choosing to sit in an optimal position for their brain to digest the movie... Left-handers and mixed-handers are known to have a more balanced distribution of function across their hemispheres so this could explain why they didn't show the opposite bias to the right-handers."

Actually, this would have been pretty good research for the 200 students to be involved in... they got to see a movie for free, just for letting researchers see where they chose to sit and then reporting their handedness.

One last thing. Okubo also reported that "more artistic, less analytical" students are more likely to sit on the right-hand side of a classroom. I guess I just learned something about the students to my left.