Measuring handedness: a validation study of Bishop's reaching card test

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Human Movement Science

Background:

• Laterality, including hand preference and performance, is crucial in understanding human motor control.
• Existing tests for assessing hand laterality have varying degrees of validity and reliability.
• Bishop's reaching card test was proposed to integrate manual preference and performance, but required validation in diverse populations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To validate Bishop's reaching card test for assessing hand laterality in a French adult population.
• To evaluate the metric qualities (homogeneity, reliability) of Bishop's test, Annett's peg-moving test, and the Purdue pegboard.
• To examine the relationship between manual preference and manual performance in distinguishing subgroups of laterality.

Main Methods:

• A sample of 260 French adults (158 right-handers, 77 left-handers, 25 ambidextrous) participated.
• Manual preference was assessed using Annett's questionnaire (1985).
• Manual performance was evaluated using Bishop's reaching card test (1996), Annett's peg-moving test (1985), and the Purdue pegboard (1948).

Main Results:

• All three manual performance tests and the questionnaire demonstrated good metric qualities, including homogeneity and test-retest reliability.
• Subgrouping participants based on manual preference (especially left-handers) could not be validated using classic tasks or Bishop's test.
• A weak association was found between manual preference and manual performance measures.

Conclusions:

• While the tested instruments show good reliability, Bishop's test did not fully validate subgroups based on manual preference.
• The weak link between preference and performance suggests that neither measure alone fully captures an individual's laterality.
• A comprehensive assessment of laterality requires the combined use of both preference and performance evaluations for each participant.