Do You Have Left-Right Confusion?

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Left-Right Confusion Test:
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/hands1.html

Directions:
After you click "Go to the first test," look at the pictures of the hands, one by one, and think or say to yourself the direction that the finger is pointing (up, down, left, or right).
As soon as you are done, click finish, and remember or write down your time. Then click "continue experiment" and do the same thing. At the end the test will compare your two timings.

Last edited by starkid on 24 Feb 2014, 8:52 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I did have until I was about 13.

The school nurse noticed my confusion between left & right.

She asked me which hand I write with, I showed her my right hand, then she said the following, "You write with your right & your left is left".

And I've never had a problem with left & right since.

I know that I get right and left mixed up. My mother and uncle are the same, and my son too.

I tried the test, but don't know how to get it to work. It just showed me a whole lot of hands at the same time, and I couldn't see where I was supposed to click for the direction they were pointing in.

I do
not so much my hands because I have a scar on my left hand but things like nuts and bolts turning them the right way

I don't even want to take the test as that is how bad I am at distinguishing left from right. I am absolutely terrible at trying to tell someone where to go if they are driving and I am the one who knows how to get there as I suck at 'turn right' 'turn left'. sometimes I have to pretend to write with both hands to figure out which one is the right(the one i write with) in order to figure it out.

I've never experienced having problems confusing left and right. The difference fell between 4.1 and 6.0 seconds, which according to stats on the site is between the 65th and 76th percentiles. I did notice some confusion with distinguishing between the left- and right-pointing hands compared to the up- and down- pointing hands, but apparently I'm better than average still.

I remember as a kid not having these problems, then, either, but I did notice other kids who did--I was in special ed. That they had this confusion perplexed me; I thought, How could somebody confuse left and right?

Did often as a kid, had to use a mirror.

My dad's girlfriend taught me the same way, but I still can't do it quickly; I have to stop and think about which hand I write with like Sweetleaf. I wonder what they say to people who write with their left hand.

Last edited by starkid on 24 Feb 2014, 9:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The easiest way to tell your right from your left is to hold your hands in front of you with the backs of your hands facing you and your fingers stretched out. Now bend your middle, pinky, and ring fingers so that your pointer finger points up and your thumb points to the area between your hands. The hand that is making an "L" is your left hand. the other is your right

I, btw, have horrible right left confusion. The second part of that test took me over 32 seconds, and I am pretty sure I made some mistakes.

I used to play rugby. I had to tape my right wrist so that I would know which direction was right, or I would routinely find myself running the opposite direction of my team on the pitch.

Both of my hands, for the record, feel like my right hand to me.

I work at a veterinary clinic as a technician, and every time we do surgeries or x-rays I literally have to take several moments closing my eyes and adjusting my body to distinguish between left and and right on the animal (it gets tough when the animal is laying on their back, legs up).

A lot of times I still have to mentally make an "L" with my left hand's thumb and index finger to ensure it's the left.

So yeah, left and right are not my friends.

I've often wondered that.

I think that's a bad test for testing right-left confusion.

I tested really well on it, but if you gave me one which had a delay between each of the hands, I'd need to go through and test which was left and which is right each time, by comparing to my right hand (I try to write with my right and, that way is right). With this, all I had to do was keep track of "is this the same as the last, what was the last". Not actually relevant to any real world sort of right-left confusion.

Clockwise/counterclockwise is so much worse though.

I had terrible right/left confusion as a kid. I'm sure it's related to my general problems with spatial/visual perception. My right/left confusion was so bad that my teachers thought I was dyslexic because I couldn't distinguish between letters like b and d, which made writing almost impossible. (This was despite the fact that I was reading at a 6th grade level by the time I was 7; dyslexia was just about the only learning disability anyone recognized 30 years ago.) The "make an L with your hand" thing didn't work for me, because I couldn't tell the difference. I eventually took to always wearing a watch on my left hand, which I would never remove, even to shower. I still had problems, notably in high school marching band and when I tried to learn to drive.
Eventually, I came to think of my left as the bass side and the right as the treble side, because years of piano playing stuck with me more than anything else. I still have trouble giving and taking directions, and I often have to try to reason it out in my head.

Interesting test...I did it twice.

The first time, my time was:
Up/Down = > 15
Left/Right = > 23

The second time, my time was:
Up/Down = 11.664
Left/Right = 15.585

Yup!