title: Plasticity of human handedness: decreased one-hand bias and inter-manual performance asymmetry in expert basketball players.
abstract: Athletes frequently have to adapt their skills to fast changes of play, often requiring the flexible execution of a particular movement skill with either hand. To assess the influence of sport-specific expertise and extensive sport training on human laterality, a video analysis of regular basketball games was performed for professional, semi-professional, and amateur players to investigate how non-dominant hand use and proficiency change with increasing expertise. Our results showed that the right-hand (i.e. dominant hand) bias in basketball players is reduced with increasing expertise (i.e., competitive level). Accordingly, we found that professional players use their non-dominant hand more often and with greater success than semi-professional and amateur players. This was true for most of the basketball-specific skills. Based on these results, we assume that increasing amounts of bilateral practice can lead to a shift in task-specific manual preference towards a higher use of both hands in competition, as well as to a higher proficiency for non-dominant hand actions in particular. From an applied perspective, the more frequent use and higher proficiency of the non-dominant hand in professional basketball players, compared with amateurs, suggests that the context-specific and skilled use of the non-dominant hand is crucial for successful play at higher competitive levels in the sport of basketball.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sport Science, Sport and Exercise Psychology Unit, University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany. tino.stoeckel@uni-rostock.de
authors.forename: Tino
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Stöckel
authors.forename: Matthias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Weigelt
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D054874:Athletic Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D001490:Basketball / Q000502:physiology*; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D014741:Video Recording; D055815:Young Adult