Westergaard G C, Champoux M, Suomi S J
Laboratory of Comparative Ethology, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health Animal Center, Poolesville, MD 20837, USA.
Child Dev. 1997 Jun;68(3):387-93. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1997.tb01946.x.
In this research we examined hand preference in infant rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). The subjects were 20 Macaca mulatta, each aged between 4 and 11 months. We assessed hand preference using both a unimanual reaching task and a bimanual coordination task. In the unimanual reaching task, we presented subjects with raisins and noted which hand the animals used to retrieve the food. In the bimanual coordination task, we presented the same subjects with plastic tubes filled with raisin paste and noted which hand the animals used to hold the tubes and which hand the animals used to remove the food. We noted a population-level bias toward use of the left hand for both tasks. These results suggest early right hemisphere advantage for reaching and bimanual coordination in Macaca mulatta, although we acknowledge that this issue needs to be examined more directly through neuroimaging procedures such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) or functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). We speculate that early right hemisphere advantage contributes to differential patterns of hand preference development for unimanual and bimanual action, and that the development of hand preference for bimanual coordination is related to the emergence of hemispheric specialization for processing species-specific vocalizations.
在本研究中，我们考察了恒河猴幼猴的用手偏好。实验对象为20只恒河猴，年龄在4至11个月之间。我们通过单手够物任务和双手协调任务来评估用手偏好。在单手够物任务中，我们给实验对象呈现葡萄干，并记录动物用哪只手获取食物。在双手协调任务中，我们给同样的实验对象呈现装有葡萄干糊的塑料管，并记录动物用哪只手拿管子以及用哪只手取出食物。我们注意到在这两项任务中，群体层面都存在偏向使用左手的倾向。这些结果表明，恒河猴在够物和双手协调方面早期存在右半球优势，尽管我们承认这个问题需要通过正电子发射断层扫描（PET）或功能磁共振成像（fMRI）等神经成像程序进行更直接的研究。我们推测，早期右半球优势导致了单手和双手动作在用手偏好发展模式上的差异，并且双手协调用手偏好的发展与处理特定物种发声的半球特化的出现有关。
