Does the Experimenter's Handedness Influence an Infant's Hand Preference for Grasping?

Fagard J, Potdevin D, Margules

Abstract

In this paper we investigated the effect of the experimenter’s handedness on infants’ choice of what hand to use in a handedness test. We divided forty-eight 12- month-old infants into four groups, depending on the experimenter’s handedness (right-handed or left-handed) and the condition (experimenter writing or not writing). The results show that when the experimenter wrote, the infants were significantly less likely to use their right hand alone to grasp objects than infants in the no writing condition, resulting in a significantly lower handedness index. However, the effect on handedness index was the same independently of the experimenter’s handedness. These results are discussed in terms of attentional factors and motor resonance influencing infants’ choice of hand during a handedness test.