Cerebral Asymmetries

Costanza Papagno is a Full Professor of Neurology at the University of Trento in Italy. She has an MD and a PhD in Neuropsychology from Milano University. She was the former President of the Italian Neuropsychology Society (2016-2022), and she is Clinical Director of the Neurocognitive Rehabilitation Centre (CeRiN), Rovereto, Italy. She is the editor-in-chief for the Journal of Neuropsychology, and on the editorial boards of Neuropsychology Review and Journal of Neurolinguistics. She is a former guest editor of Cortex. Major themes of her research are the anatomical correlates of figurative language, verbal short-term memory, and neuropsychological disorders in Parkinson's disease. Paul Corballis is a cognitive neuroscientist with research interests in visual perception, attention, and cognition. He received his PhD from Columbia in 1997, spent several years at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, joined the School of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 2002, and returned to the University of Auckland in 2011. His research incorporates psychophysical, electrophysiological, neuroimaging, and neuropsychological approaches to study human visual perception, attention, and awareness. Topics include target selection and distractor suppression in visual search, the functional organization of the cortical visual system, and the interaction between attention and emotion in young and ageing populations. The hemispheric organization of the visual system has been a major theme in much of his research, as well as cortical organization at finer scales, and in relationships between brain activity and variability in human performance.

1. Cerebral asymmetry – Historical introduction

Section I. Anatomical asymmetries
2. Asymmetries in the human brain
3. Latent dimensions of brain asymmetry
4. On the relation between brain and visceral asymmetry: Evidence from situs inversus in humans

Section II. Clinical
5. Oncology - Brain asymmetries
6. Cerebral asymmetries in schizophrenia
7. Hemispheric asymmetry in neurodegenerative diseases

Section III. Consciousness/attention
8. Interhemispheric differences in visual attention
9. Left-and right-side unilateral spatial neglect. Hemispheric differences
10. Split-brain patients: A clinical versus experimental perspective

Section IV. Development and Lifespan
11. Aging
12. Development of handedness and other lateralized functions during infancy and early childhood

Section V. Genetics, hormones, evolution
13. Handedness and brain asymmetries in nonhuman primates
14. Brain and behavioral asymmetries in non-primate species
15. Hemispheric asymmetries, paleoneurology, and the evolution of the human genus
16. Large-scale genetic mapping for human brain asymmetry
17. Sex/gender differences in hemispheric asymmetries

Section VI. Language
18. Functional and structural brain asymmetries in language processing
19. Brain asymmetries in figurative language comprehension
20. Lateralization of reading and visual word processing
21. Functional and structural brain asymmetries in sign language processing
22. Unveiling the hemispheric specialization of language: Organization and neuroplasticity

Section VII. Movement/motor asymmetries/cerebellum
23. Cerebellar asymmetries
24. Handedness
25. Hemispheric asymmetries in the control of upper limb movements

Section IIX. Other cognitive and perceptual function
26. The arts and hemispheric specialization
27. Emotion: an evolutionary model of lateralization in the human brain
28. Hemispheric asymmetries in face recognition in health and dysfunction
29. Hemispheric asymmetries in episodic memory
30. Brain laterality of numbers and calculation. Complex networks and their development.
31. Seeing and visualizing across the hemispheres