In most people, the right hemisphere primarily controls?

• A. Spatial orientation and left-sided neglect.
• B. Speech and language.
• C. Memory for facts.
• D. Visual acuity.

Answer: (C)

The right hemisphere is specialized for nonverbal, spatial processing and attention. It helps you judge spatial relationships, navigate environments, and interpret complex visual scenes, and it also supports recognizing faces and processing prosody in speech. When the right parietal or related areas are damaged, people can develop left-sided neglect, ignoring things on the left side of space. In contrast, memory for facts—semantic memory—is largely left-lateralized in most people because it relies on language-based encoding and retrieval housed in the left temporal and frontal areas. So the right hemisphere’s primary contributions are spatial and nonverbal processing rather than memory for factual information.