
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 23, 1993                   TAG: 9308230078
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: TORONTO                                LENGTH: Short

LEFT-HANDED? THOSE LAPSES ARE NO ACCIDENT

Left-handed people may be more accident-prone than right-handers, and one reason may be a slightly greater tendency toward minor mental lapses, a new study suggests.

In the study of 2,379 male Navy enlisted personnel, people who said they had more lapses also reported more accidents, and southpaws reported having more lapses and more accidents than right-handers.

The lapses are "minor mental mistakes that any of us would make when we're perhaps tired or distracted," said study author Gerald Larson. They could lead to mishaps because "we kind of lose track of what we're doing," he said.

Larson, who did the work with colleagues at the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center in San Diego, Calif., discussed it in an interview before presenting it Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.

Larson, who is right-handed, stressed that the study was not an official Defense Department project and said the findings cannot be applied to every left-hander.

He said mental lapses can be considered evidence of distractability, and that they should be included as one possible explanation for accident rates among southpaws.

Larson said such lapses would not be a result of being left-handed. Instead, he said, whatever biological factors produced the left-handedness may also produce the lapses.

by CNB