ONE GLOVE.(The Talk of the Town)(lost gloves)

The ratio of right-handed people to left-handed people is said to be about nine to one (and this dominance goes back more than a million years, apparently), so the lost-glove theory espoused by Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist who taught at Hunter College last fall, either needs work or suggests that New York is more of a lefty town than most. Last winter, Horowitz began collecting the misplaced--trampled, forlorn, snot-slicked--mittens and gloves that she saw on the street, not for the sake of research or even, God forbid, art, but out of some deep-seated altruistic urge to see them reunited with their other halves.

"It's an overweening concern for lost objects," she said last week--a very cold week, a great week for gloves. "The melancholy of a lost glove sitting in the middle of a sidewalk struck me as minorly tragic, for the glove and for its owner." Horowitz, who is tall and skinny and thirty-four years old, was in her family's apartment on Central Park West, with her collection in shopping bags on the kitchen counter: a hundred and eighteen mittens and gloves, in varying states of deformity and decay. Black wool dominated, but there was, semi-Arkishly, one of everything: brown zippered faux leather (Lower East Side), tan elbow-length nylon (Lincoln Center), a ludicrous boxing glove (center lane, Columbus Avenue). There were dozens of children's gloves, of course, including Horowitz's first find, a crusty blue mitten, and some thumbless things for infants (and even one for a dog). Central Park is full of little mittens, she said, especially on snowy nights, after the sledders head home. Storefronts, pay phones, subway stairs--O city of lost gloves!

Horowitz, whose work involves studying the behavior of animals and making inferences about their minds, had done a breakdown--three to one, right hand to left--and come up with a hypothesis. "It's what I call active loss," she explained. "The glove isn't just falling away; the owner has removed it to do something with the dominant hand: dial a phone, dig for change, shake someone's hand. In the cognitive distraction of paying or meeting someone, the glove gets lost. Given that for most people the dominant hand is the right, they're more apt to lose the right glove." Horowitz has observed that, among pedestrians who have one glove off, it's usually the right hand that's bare.

Wearing colorful, hand-knit mittens ...