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Children's bilateral advantage for grasp-to-eat actions becomes unimanual by age 10 years
Jason W Flindall1, Claudia L R Gonzalez1
1The Brain in Action Laboratory, Department of Kinesiology, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alberta T1K 3M4, Canada.
Insights
Children develop a right-hand advantage for eating actions later than previously thought, around age 10. This finding sheds light on the origins of human right-handedness.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Motor Control
- Human Evolution
Background:
- Infants show early hand preference for feeding actions compared to other tasks.
- Adult studies reveal kinematic asymmetries in grasp-to-eat actions, suggesting a right-hand advantage for feeding.
- This feeding advantage is hypothesized to contribute to global right-handedness.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the development of grasp-to-eat and grasp-to-place kinematics in children aged 7-12 years.
- To determine when task-specific kinematic lateralization emerges in children's reach-to-grasp actions.
- To contribute kinematic data for typically developing children's actions.
Main Methods:
- Examined kinematics of grasp-to-eat and grasp-to-place actions in two groups of children (7-12 years).
- Analyzed maximum grip apertures (MGAs) for both dominant and non-dominant hands.
- Described detailed kinematics of reach-to-grasp actions.
Main Results:
- The kinematic difference between grasp-to-eat and grasp-to-place actions was present bilaterally in younger children.
- Kinematic lateralization of these actions was observed later, around the end of the first decade of life.
- Detailed kinematic descriptions for children's dominant and non-dominant hand actions were cataloged.
Conclusions:
- The maturation of the right-hand advantage for grasp-to-eat actions occurs later in development than previously assumed.
- This suggests a developmental trajectory for right-handedness influenced by feeding-specific biases.
- Findings support an inherent right-hand/left-hemisphere bias for feeding actions potentially shaping population-level right-handedness.
Abstract:
Studies have shown that infants tend to develop a lateralized hand preference for hand-to-mouth actions earlier than they do a preference for many other grasp-to-place or grasp-to-manipulate tasks, years even before direction of hand preference can be reliably determined. This observation has led to a series of studies contrasting the kinematics of grasp-to-eat and grasp-to-place actions in adults. These studies have described a robust kinematic asymmetry between left- and right-handed grasp-to-eat maximum grip apertures (MGAs) that has been interpreted as a right-hand advantage for feeding that may have led to right-handedness as observed on a global scale. The current study examines grasp-to-eat and grasp-to-place kinematics in two groups of typically developing children aged 7 to 12 years. It was found that the previously described task difference is present in both hands among younger children and that the effect does not become lateralized until the end of the first decade of life. Additional kinematics of both the dominant and non-dominant hands are described in detail to augment a growing catalogue of reach-to-grasp action descriptions for typically developing children. The maturation of the right-hand advantage for grasp-to-eat actions is discussed in terms of an inherent right-hand/left-hemisphere bias for such actions that may have influenced the development of population-level right-handedness in humans.
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