Abstract
I describe methodological and statistical issues in the assessment of hand preference in nonhuman primates and discuss them in the context of a recent paper by McGrew and Marchant (1997) in which they conclude that there is no convincing evidence of population-level hand preferences in nonhuman primates. The criteria used by them to evaluate individual and population-level hand preferences are flawed, which results in an oversimplification of findings in nonhuman primates. I further argue that the classification schema used by McGrew and Marchant (1997) to compare hand preference distributions between species is theoretically weak and does not offer a meaningful way to compare human and nonhuman primate handedness.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 851-866 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | International Journal of Primatology |
Volume | 20 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1999 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Chimpanzees
- Hand preference
- Research methods
- Statistics
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Animal Science and Zoology