(August 2026) Left-handedness has a certain mystique in cognitive science circles. For decades, researchers have documented that left-handers tend to have an edge in visuospatial tasks – things like mentally rotating shapes, judging distances, or reading maps – a pattern usually attributed to differences in how the brain’s two hemispheres divide up cognitive labour. Right-handers, meanwhile, have seemed to be better at language-based tasks.

Handedness and lateralisation of the brain

Why might left- and right-handers show any cognitive differences at all? Each hand is mostly controlled by the opposite side of the brain, and the two hemispheres of the brain are known to specialise in certain functions.

Since right-handers tend to have more left-hemisphere dominance and left-handers more mixed dominance, some researchers reasoned that this split might carry over into different memory strengths, with perhaps right-handers doing better on verbal memory, left-handers on visuospatial memory.

Earlier research on this has been a mixed bag. Some studies of older adults found left-handers had a visual memory edge; others, using much larger samples, found nothing. For verbal memory specifically — remembering words and lists — the picture has been similarly inconsistent.

Testing whether older adults enjoy memory advantages based on handedness using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe

Senior lecturer in experimental neuropsychology Annukka Lindell, from La Trobe University in Australia, used Wave 9 SHARE data from over 51,000 people aged 60 and up across 28 countries – a huge sample by the standards of handedness research, which usually makes do with a few hundred or a few thousand participants.

Everyone was asked two simple things. First, a subjective question: "How would you rate your memory at the present time?" (from excellent down to poor). Second, an objective test: they were read a list of 10 common words, asked to recall as many as they could right away, and then asked again five minutes later. That gave Lindell both what people believed about their own memory, and how their memory actually performed.

Participants also reported their dominant hand, with natural ambidexterity carefully defined as being born equally adept with both hands, rather than having adapted to use both over a lifetime. Around 90% of the sample were right-handed, 6% left-handed, and just under 4% identified as ambidextrous. The three groups didn't differ meaningfully in years of education, ruling out one obvious confound.

The result: no difference, full stop

Across a sample this large, if handedness had any real effect on memory it should have shown up clearly. It didn't. Older adults performed statistically indistinguishably on both the immediate and the delayed recall tests, regardless of handedness.

Gender differences in verbal memory

The study did find one factor that reliably predicted memory performance: gender, not handedness. Women outperformed men on both the immediate and delayed recall tests, a gap consistently identified in memory research performed on any age group.

This phenomenon is important to know, because cut-off scores used to flag possible cognitive decline are sometimes applied uniformly, without factoring this in. Applying one bar to both men and women risks penalising men or missing early decline in women.

A curious quirk around ambidexterity

Globally, hand preference is thought to split roughly into right-handed (85–90%), left-handed (about 10%), and truly, naturally ambidextrous (only around 1%). Recall that nearly 4% of this sample identified as ambidextrous – well above what we’d expect. This raises a question about what people mean when they call themselves ambidextrous. Some may be closer to “mixed-handed”: using different hands for different things (e.g. writing with the left, throwing a ball with the right) rather than being equally skilled with both from birth.

The researcher raises the possibility that people inclined to describe themselves as ambidextrous may simply be a more self-assured group generally, and that this same tendency could be shaping how they rate other things about themselves — including their memory. That speculation lines up with what the subjective ratings showed: people who identified as ambidextrous rated their memory a bit more positively than right-handers did, even though, per the results above, their actual test performance was no different from anyone else's.

To sum up

Whatever cognitive edge left-handers may enjoy elsewhere, it doesn’t appear to extend to verbal memory in later life. The most salient finding in the same data is the confirmation of the gender gap – a reminder that benchmarks used to flag memory concerns in older age should probably account for who’s being tested, not just what they score.

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Study by Lindell, A. K. (2026). Handedness Influences Subjective Memory Ratings but not Objective Memory Performance in Older Adults. Perceptual and Motor Skills.

URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/00315125261475579

Picture via Centre for Ageing Better.