Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada.
Eur J Neurosci. 2020 Apr;51(7):1642-1656. doi: 10.1111/ejn.14542. Epub 2019 Aug 28.
Approximately ten per cent of humans are left-handed or ambidextrous (adextral). It has been suggested that, despite their sizable representation at the whole-population level, this demographic is largely avoided by researchers within the neuroimaging community. To date, however, no formal effort has been made to quantify the extent to which adextrals are excluded from neuroimaging-based research. Here, we aimed to address this question in a review of over 1,000 recent articles published in high-impact, peer-reviewed, neuroimaging-focused journals. Specifically, we sought to ascertain whether, and the extent to which adextrals are underrepresented in neuroimaging study samples, and to delineate potential trends in this bias. Handedness data were available for over 30,000 research subjects; only around 3%-4% of these individuals were adextral-considerably less than the 10% benchmark one would expect if neuroimaging samples were truly representative of the general population. This observation was generally consistent across different areas of research, but was modulated by the demographic characteristics of neuroimaging participants. The epistemological and ethical implications of these findings are discussed.
大约有 10%的人类是左撇子或双手都灵巧（双利手）。尽管在整个人群中，他们的数量相当大，但神经影像学领域的研究人员在很大程度上回避了这一人群。然而，迄今为止，尚未有任何正式的努力来量化双利手在基于神经影像学的研究中被排除的程度。在这里，我们旨在通过对发表在高影响力、同行评审、专注于神经影像学的期刊上的 1000 多篇近期文章的综述来回答这个问题。具体来说，我们试图确定在神经影像学研究样本中，双利手是否以及在何种程度上代表性不足，并描绘这种偏见的潜在趋势。超过 30000 名研究对象的 handedness 数据可用；这些人中只有约 3%-4%是双利手，远低于人们预期的神经影像学样本如果真正代表一般人群的 10%基准。这一观察结果在不同的研究领域基本一致，但受到神经影像学参与者人口统计学特征的调节。这些发现的认识论和伦理意义将被讨论。
