A vast amount of research suggests that making laterality judgments about left and right body parts is achieved by an embodied mental rotation process. Therefore the laterality judgment task has been extensively used in the last decade in order to investigate properties of motor imagery and furthermore to assess clinical populations concerning their motor imagery abilities. Nevertheless it is still not sufficiently clear in which way the decision is actually derived. In this study the predictions of two models concerning this issue are tested. Firstly the two- stage model which assumes a decision based on initial rapid visual recognition and furthermore the recently proposed hand- binding model according to which it is not motor imagery but a multisensory integrative process that underlies the laterality decision. A forced laterality judgment task, in which participants were only given a very short amount of time to respond was implemented in order to investigate specific predictions of the two models. The analysis could not find further evidence for the hand- binding model, whereas none of the findings contradicted the predictions of the two- stage model.