Children’s bilateral advantage for grasp-to-eat actions becomes unimanual by age 10 years

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 12years. 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.