The Role of Sports Participation in Hemispheric Dominance: Assessment by Electrodermal Activity Signals

This study aims at evaluating hemispheric differences between active sportsmen (n=17) and sedentary control subjects (n=21) using Electrodermal Activity (EDA), which is a physiologic measure of emotional sweating. Following the denoising of the acquired EDA records, feature extraction functions were utilized for each record to generate a feature vector, containing 14 parameters per record. Statistical significances of the differences and similarities between feature vectors were determined by unpaired t-test (p<0.05 and p>0.95). Findings from this study show that the agreement of hemispheric dominance test with hand preference is significantly lower for active sportsmen in comparison to control group. This implies that participation in sport activity may play a facilitative role in a more equally weighted development of both hemispheres by somewhat decreasing the hemispheric lateralization.