Hand preference and its flexibility according to the position of the object: a study in cercopithecines examining spontaneous behaviour and an experimental task (the Bishop QHP task)

Abstract

The extant literature on manual laterality in non-human primates is inconclusive, plagued by inconsistent or contradictory findings and by disturbing methodological issues (e.g. uncontrolled influential factors, comparability issues). The present study examined hand preference and its flexibility in 15 red-capped mangabeys (C. t. torquatus) and 13 Campbell's monkeys (C. c. campbelli), two species that differ in their degree of arboreality. We investigated the influence of the spatial position of the object on hand preference for reaching. We considered spontaneous behaviour (reaching for food during daily feeding) and an experimental task: the QHP task. The QHP is a task that is used in humans. This is a simple reaching task that involves high spatial constraints on hand use. In our study, the subject had to reach for items that were placed on a semi-circle in front of it on five positions, including in the centre position, in the ipsilateral space and in the contralateral space. We assessed hand preference for reaching in front (baseline condition), and we examined how this preference changed when reaching in lateral positions. For reaching in front, about half of the subjects were lateralized and no group-level bias occurred, for both spontaneous and experimental conditions. When considering reaching in the lateral positions, we observed that the position of the object influenced hand use: individuals used the hand that was closest to the object. The results are discussed in relation to previous findings in humans and in non-human primates and regarding theories on handedness and flexibility of hand preference.

Baboons' hand preference resists to spatial factors for a communicative gesture but not for a simple manipulative action

“…Such a differential effect of situational factors on hand preference is in line with the few available studies that have compared handedness for different manual tasks and/or species using the QHP task. For instance, it had been found that the direction of hand preference was strongly affected by the position of an item to grasp in mangabeys and Campbell's monkeys (Chapelain et al, ). In a comparative work, Meunier and co‐authors (2012; this issue) highlighted convergent distributions of hand biases in macaques, baboons and human infants, with patterns very similar to ours.…”

“…Hand preference was sampled by recording the hand used to pick up each card. This task has been thereafter adapted to non‐human primates in a very comparable set‐up (Chapelain et al, ; Meunier et al, ; Meunier et al, ). We provide a brief description of the experimental set‐up here.…”

“…We provide a brief description of the experimental set-up here. Full details of the methods and procedures are available elsewhere (Chapelain et al, 2012;Meunier et al, 2011;Meunier et al, 2012).…”

“…The prediction was that switching hand across positions indicated weaker preferences than keeping hand consistent across positions. Adaptations of this task for children (Esseily et al, ; Jacquet et al, ) and non‐human primates & (Chapelain et al, ; Meunier, Blois‐Heulin, & Vauclair, ; Meunier et al, ; Meunier et al, ) have proved recently successful in highlighting the influence of situational factors on handedness for reaching actions.…”

Patterns of hemispheric specialization for a communicative gesture in different primate species

“…Thus, our experimental paradigm allowed us to assess hand preferences in several species both in a communication task and a simple (manipulative) grasping task, while controlling spatial and postural factors, two factors considered to affect hand preferences (Bishop et al, 1996;Calvert & Bishop, 1998;Leconte & Fagard, 2004). Even though these positional factors may have a crucial influence on hand preferences, they have almost never been quantified in nonhuman primates (but see Bourjade et al, 2013;Chapelain et al, 2012;Meunier, Blois-Heulin, & Vauclair, 2011). The present report grouped results issued from several studies taking into consideration all of these critical methodological points.…”