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Related Experiment Videos

Hand preferences in Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus).

Vanessa Schmitt1, Sandra Melchisedech, Kurt Hammerschmidt

  • 1German Primate Center, Göttingen, Germany. vanessa138@gmx.de

Laterality
|February 28, 2008
PubMed
Summary
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Barbary macaques do not show population-level hand preference for simple tasks. Individual differences in handedness were observed, with preference increasing with age in unimanual tasks.

Area of Science:

  • Primate behavior
  • Ethology
  • Evolutionary psychology

Background:

  • Human right-handedness (nearly 90%) prompts evolutionary questions.
  • Vertebrate lateralization is common, but primate hand preference at population level is debated.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate hand preference in Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) at the population level.
  • To determine if hand preference differs between unimanual and bimanual tasks.
  • To explore the relationship between age and hand preference.

Main Methods:

  • Observation of Barbary macaques performing unimanual (reaching for grains) and bimanual tasks (opening a box, reaching into a tube).
  • Recording of hand used for each task.
  • Analysis of population-level hand preference and individual handedness indices.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • No significant population-level hand preference was found for any task.
  • Individual hand preferences varied among macaques.
  • A positive correlation between age and handedness index was observed for the unimanual task only.

Conclusions:

  • Monkeys, like Barbary macaques, do not exhibit population-level hand preference.
  • Handedness may be an individual trait rather than a population-wide characteristic in nonhuman primates.
  • Age influences hand preference in unimanual tasks in this species.