Primatology Centre of Strasbourg University, Fort Foch, 67207, Niederhausbergen, France.
Dev Psychobiol. 2013 Sep;55(6):662-71. doi: 10.1002/dev.21151. Epub 2013 Jul 12.
We review four studies investigating hand preferences for grasping versus pointing to objects at several spatial positions in human infants and three species of nonhuman primates using the same experimental setup. We expected that human infants and nonhuman primates present a comparable difference in their pattern of laterality according to tasks. We tested 6 capuchins, 6 macaques, 12 baboons, and 10 human infants. Those studies are the first of their kind to examine both human infants and nonhuman primate species with the same communicative task. Our results show remarkable convergence in the distribution of hand biases of human infants, baboons and macaques on the two kinds of tasks and an interesting divergence between capuchins' and other species' hand preferences in the pointing task. They support the hypothesis that left-lateralized language may be derived from a gestural communication system that was present in the common ancestor of macaques, baboons and humans.
我们回顾了四项研究，这些研究调查了人类婴儿和三种非人类灵长类动物在几种空间位置上用手抓握物体与指向物体的偏好，使用的是相同的实验设置。我们预计，人类婴儿和非人类灵长类动物根据任务表现出相似的偏侧性模式差异。我们测试了 6 只卷尾猴、6 只猕猴、12 只狒狒和 10 名人类婴儿。这些研究首次使用相同的交际任务同时检验了人类婴儿和非人类灵长类动物。我们的结果表明，在两种任务中，人类婴儿、狒狒和猕猴的手偏向分布存在显著的趋同，而在指向任务中，卷尾猴和其他物种的手偏好存在有趣的分歧。这些结果支持了这样一种假设，即左利手可能源于在猕猴、狒狒和人类的共同祖先中存在的手势交际系统。
