I'm listening! I think I'm up to date as alayman but would love a few citations.
Hi aline -- happy to oblige!
The quick version is:
Both hemispheres have areas for
- visual processing
- auditory processing
- identifying familiar objects
- processing spatial locations and spatial relationships
- processing information coming in from the body
- planning body movements
- reasoning and decision-making
- and much more
The left hemisphere
- has a few areas that are specialized for language (but may be more generally for fast temporal changes)
The right hemisphere
- is more strongly involved in spatial processing
- is specialized for some "large scale" language stuff (e.g. discourse processing)
All this is just for right-handers. Left handers may be the same, reversed, or mixed.
The popular media have drastically over-exaggerated and over-simplified these issues. The whole "right brain equals logical, sequential, detail-oriented, mathematical; left brain equals intuitive, wholistic, artistic" mythology is just simply made up.
The two hemispheres are connected by a thick band of communicative fibers called the corpus callosum. The two hemispheres function together as a single system. Everyone uses both. There is no such thing as a "left-brained person" or a "right-brained person."
As for citations, well, the literature is vast. Your best bet is a good undergraduate text in cognitive psychology or cognitive neuroscience. My personal choice is Reisberg's text, but it's quite pricey (they all are).
Please feel free to ask me any more specific questions you may have!
Meg
