title: Relationships between the direction of movements and handedness in children.
abstract: It has been proposed that human handedness can be deduced from the direction of voluntary movements. To test this assumption, children of an elementary school were observed as they performed several tasks with their dominant hand; drawing circles on a piece of paper, making circular movements in the air with their index finger, drawing a human profile, boring and drawing a horizontal line. Both handedness of the children and the directionality of their drawings and movements were assessed. It appeared that the direction of drawing a horizontal line is the only variable that differentiates well between handedness groups. While this variable was hardly influenced by age, other variables were. Circling, for instance, was predominantly clockwise in the youngest and counter-clockwise in the older children. It was argued that the handedness of individual subjects cannot safely be determined from these measures.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Tilburg University, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: J G
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Scheirs
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance