Human handedness: An inherited evolutionary trait

Forrester, Gillian S.; Quaresmini, Caterina; Leavens, David A.; Mareschal, Denis; Thomas, Michael S. C.

doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2012.09.037

Cited by 79 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 91 publications

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“…For gorillas, we employed two digital video cameras (Panasonic NVGS11B), one with a close view on the focal subject and one with a wider view of the surrounding social environment. Video footage was synchronized using a flash bulb (see Forrester, 2008;Forrester et al, 2011Forrester et al, , 2012Forrester et al, , 2013. Video streams were later compressed into a single file of 15 frames/s and composed by a top/bottom format for subsequent coding (i.e., focal view in the top and wide view in the bottom).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social environment elicits lateralized behaviors in gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

Quaresmini

Forrester

Spiezio

et al. 2014

Journal of Comparative Psychology

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The influence of the social environment on lateralized behaviors has now been investigated across a wide variety of animal species. New evidence suggests that the social environment can modulate behavior. Currently, there is a paucity of data relating to how primates navigate their environmental space, and investigations that consider the naturalistic context of the individual are few and fragmented. Moreover, there are competing theories about whether only the right or rather both cerebral hemispheres are involved in the processing of social stimuli, especially in emotion processing. Here we provide the first report of lateralized social behaviors elicited by great apes. We employed a continuous focal animal sampling method to record the spontaneous interactions of a captive zoo-living colony of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and a biological family group of peer-reared western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). We specifically focused on which side of the body (i.e., front, rear, left, right) the focal individual preferred to keep conspecifics. Utilizing a newly developed quantitative corpus-coding scheme, analysis revealed both chimpanzees and gorillas demonstrated a significant group-level preference for focal individuals to keep conspecifics positioned to the front of them compared with behind them. More interestingly, both groups also manifested a population-level bias to keep conspecifics on their left side compared with their right side. Our findings suggest a social processing dominance of the right hemisphere for context-specific social environments. Results are discussed in light of the evolutionary adaptive value of social stimulus as a triggering factor for the manifestation of group-level lateralized behaviors.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social environment elicits lateralized behaviors in gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

Quaresmini

Forrester

Spiezio

et al. 2014

Journal of Comparative Psychology

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“…The authors noted that traditional studies of handedness were narrowly defined and did not represent the naturalistic actions of daily life. A recent study of children also found that hand dominance varied across targets, even in those who are otherwise considered right-hand dominant by parent report [56]. The authors demonstrated that while typically developing right-handed boys (aged 4-5 years) expressed a significant right hand dominance for object manipulation, no hand preference was found for hand actions directed toward social partners and the self.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Handedness as a marker of cerebral lateralization in children with and without autism

Forrester

Pegler

Thomas

et al. 2014

Behavioural Brain Research

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h i g h l i g h t s• We report on a detailed set of hand actions from two populations of right-handed boys.• Typically developing boys demonstrated a right hand bias for actions to objects.• Typically developing boys also demonstrated a left hand bias for actions to the self.• Boys with autism revealed mixed-handedness for actions to objects and to the self.• Handedness reveals a dissociation for functional specialization of the hemispheres. a r t i c l e i n f o b s t r a c tWe employed a multiple case studies approach to investigate lateralization of hand actions in typically and atypically developing children between 4 and 5 years of age. We report on a detailed set of over 1200 hand actions made by four typically developing boys and four boys with autism. Participants were assessed for unimanual hand actions to both objects and the self (self-directed behaviors). Individual and group analyses suggest that typically developing children have a right hand dominance for hand actions to objects and a left hand dominance for hand actions for self-directed behaviors, revealing a possible dissociation for functional specialization of the left and right hemispheres respectively. Children with autism demonstrated mixed-handedness for both target conditions, consistent with the hypothesis that there is reduced cerebral specialization in these children. The findings are consistent with the view that observed lateralized motor action can serve as an indirect behavioral marker for evidence of cerebral lateralization.

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“…In studies of motor lateralization, social context has been suggested to incorporate different patterns of hemispheric specialization in the performance of the action as compared with non-social context (Forrester et al, 2014b). Generally, actions directed to social partners and the self tend to increase the left hand use indicating greater involvement of right hemisphere (Forrester et al 2013;Rogers and Kaplan, 1995). Based on this concept, we suggest that social context can favour or at least modify the expression of lateralization of trunk use in elephants as compared with non-social context.…”

Section: Animal Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Context-dependent lateralization of trunk movements in wild Asian elephants

Giljov

Silva

Karenina

2017

BioComm

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Asymmetrical trunk use in elephants represents a distinctive example of motor lateralization. Previous studies have shown that trunk movements in the elephant behaviour associated with feeding is lateralized at the individual, but not the population level. The manifestation of lateralized behaviour depends on the nature of the behaviour and is usually more pronounced in social context. Therefore, we hypothesized that population-level lateralization of trunk use in elephants is manifested in social behaviour. One-sided biases in trunk movements were assessed in wild individually-identified Asian elephants during feeding (tearing off a tuft of grass) and social interactions (trunk-to-mouth contacts and trunk-to-genitals contacts between male initiator and female recipient). In feeding, lateralization at the individual and population levels was estimated based on 50 lateral trunk uses per individual. In social interactions, only the population-level bias was assessed using a single trunk contact from each individual. For trunk movements during feeding, elephants showed robust individual preferences, but no population-level lateralization. The distribution of right-and left-trunkers in the present study did not differ significantly from that obtained in previous studies of both the same elephant population and geographically distinct population. No population-level bias in trunk movements during trunk-to-mouth contacts was revealed. In trunk-to-genitals contacts, in contrast, a population-level lateralization was found. Right-sided trunk movements prevailed in males touching females. While individual preferences for feeding, combined with the absence of one-sided population bias, is obviously a species-typical characteristic of Asian elephants, social behaviour, such as male-female socio-sexual contacts, can elicit population-level lateralization of trunk use in this species. The right-sided bias in trunk-to-genitals contacts may reflect lateralization of olfactory perception. If this is the case, the revealed lateralization indicates a right-hemispheric advantage in the processing of social information which is consistent with the general tendency in mammals.

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Human handedness: An inherited evolutionary trait

Cited by 79 publications

References 91 publications

Social environment elicits lateralized behaviors in gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

Social environment elicits lateralized behaviors in gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

Handedness as a marker of cerebral lateralization in children with and without autism

Context-dependent lateralization of trunk movements in wild Asian elephants

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