Day Twenty-Three

(really day 24 on our sheet-looking for an article in our library database)

Day 23! Can't believe it's been over three weeks. Only five more days until we're finally done with this project. Crazy, really.

Here's an article I found relating to my project.

In this article, they did an experiment, as most of my articles are about, to see the effects of the dominant vs. non dominant hand. They used handicapped children for their "test" subjects. The students were aged from 4-13 years of age. They chose 20 to use their dominant hand, and 20 to use their non dominant hand, and asked the kids to draw a picture of a man. Then they turned the paper around and asked them to draw another picture of a man using their other hand.

They noticed that most of the pictures drawn with the non-dominant hand were much less detailed and had much less coordination. They said that this also seemed to "reduce" the mental age, meaning their drawings seemed to be drawn by a child younger than the child's actual age. They estimated about 1 year in "mental age loss".

I find it interesting. Again, it's just so hard to use your non dominant hand. It takes so much practice to get used to and to be able to actually function with it. That's basically the message I keep getting from all of these articles.