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Right-handed one day, right-handed the next day?

Jacqueline Fagard1, Daniela Corbetta2, Eszter Somogyi1

  • 1Integrative Neuroscience Cognitive Center, University Paris Descartes CNRS, Paris, France.

Laterality
|February 19, 2020
PubMed

Insights

Infant hand preference can fluctuate, but daily testing over five days shows reliable directional results. While most infants showed consistent hand use, the degree of preference varied, indicating test-retest reliability for direction but not degree.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Human Motor Control

Background:

  • Hand preference, or handedness, emerges early in development.
  • Infant handedness shows fluctuations, raising questions about the reliability of single-session assessments.
  • Short-term test-retest reliability of infant handedness assessments is under-researched.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To evaluate the short-term test-retest reliability of infant handedness.
  • To determine if single-session testing provides reliable handedness results in infants aged 9-15 months.

Main Methods:

  • 21 infants (9-15 months) underwent a standardized handedness test daily for 5 sessions.
  • Handedness Index (HI) and handedness category were calculated for each session.
  • Comparisons were made across sessions at both group and individual levels.

Main Results:

  • Group-level handedness distribution remained stable across the 5 sessions.
  • At the individual level, 52.4% of infants showed consistent hand use (lateralization) across sessions.
  • Only 19% were consistently right-handed; most fluctuations were between lateralized and non-lateralized states.

Conclusions:

  • Infant handedness testing demonstrates fair reliability for the direction of hand preference (right vs. left).
  • The degree of hand preference shows less reliability in repeated short-term testing.
  • Results suggest caution when interpreting the precise degree of handedness from single assessments in this age group.

Keywords:
Handednessinfantshort-term test-retest evaluation

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