Evolutionary motor biases and cognition in children with and without autism.

Evolution has endowed vertebrates with a divided brain that allows for processing of critical survival behaviours in parallel. Most humans possess a standard functional brain organisation for these ancient sensory-motor behaviours, favouring the right hemisphere for fight-or-flight processes and the left hemisphere for performing structured motor sequences. However, a significant minority of the population possess an organisational phenotype that represents crowding of function in one hemisphere, or a reversal of the standard functional organisation.

A comparative perspective on lateral biases and social behavior.

Cerebral lateralization and associated motor behaviors were historically thought to be characteristics unique to humans. Today, it is clear that these features are present and visible in other animal species. These shared attributes of brain and behavior suggest inheritance from a distant common ancestor.

The left cradling bias: An evolutionary facilitator of social cognition?

A robust left side cradling bias (LCB) in humans is argued to reflect an evolutionarily old left visual field bias and right hemisphere dominance for processing social stimuli. A left visual field bias for face processing, invoked via the LCB, is known to reflect a human population-level right cerebral hemisphere specialization for processing social stimuli. We explored the relationship between cradling side biases, hand dominance and socio-communicative abilities.

The association between psychological stress and miscarriage: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

This systematic review and meta-analysis was designed to investigate whether maternal psychological stress and recent life events are associated with an increased risk of miscarriage. A literature search was conducted to identify studies reporting miscarriage in women with and without history of exposure to psychological stress (the only exposure considered). The search produced 1978 studies; 8 studies were suitable for analysis.

Lateralization of infant holding by mothers: A longitudinal evaluation of variations over the first 12 weeks.

The maternal preference to hold infants on the left rather than right side of the body was examined longitudinally, with attention to 4 explanations: maternal monitoring of infant state, maternal handedness, infant proximity to the mother's heartbeat, and preferred infant head position. The side and site of holding were measured over the first 12 weeks of the lives of 24 infants. Information about group and individual consistency in holding side allowed novel evaluation of the theories.

Putting the "Joy" in joint attention: affective-gestural synchrony by parents who point for their babies.

Despite a growing body of work examining the expression of infants' positive emotion in joint attention contexts, few studies have examined the moment-by-moment dynamics of emotional signaling by adults interacting with babies in these contexts. We invited 73 parents of infants (three fathers) to our laboratory, comprising parent-infant dyads with babies at 6 (n = 15), 9 (n = 15), 12 (n = 15), 15 (n = 14), and 18 (n = 14) months of age. Parents were asked to sit in a chair centered on the long axis of a room and to point to distant dolls (2.

When left means right: an explanation of the left cradling bias in terms of right hemisphere specializations.

Previous research has indicated that 70-85% of women and girls show a bias to hold infants, or dolls, to the left side of their body. This bias is not matched in males (e.g.