About the advantage of left-handers in volleyball

Florian Loffing and Norbert Hagemann, together with Jörg Schorer (Münster) and Joseph Baker (Toronto), have published a new study on left-handers in sport. In the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, they present a study on the prediction of left-handed vs. right-handed opponents' intentions using the example of attacking shots in volleyball. The study confirms previous findings to the effect that the direction of left-handed attacking strokes could be estimated worse on average than the direction of comparable right-handed strokes. This difference was particularly evident when only early information about the attacking movement was available for prediction (e.g. videos stopped 160 ms before the ball was hit by an attacker's hand). Globally, experienced volleyball players achieved significantly better prediction performance than novices, but at the same time, the hand-skill-related performance differences were more pronounced for them. Overall, the results support the assumption that left-handed athletes may have a performance advantage in interactive sports due to their relative rarity compared to right-handers and the resulting lower familiarity of their opponents with left-handed movement patterns.

Link to article:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/bp75517553350644/