Captive chimpanzees’ manual laterality in tool use context: Influence of 
communication and of sociodemographic factors

Prieur, Jacques; Pika, Simone; Blois-Heulin, Catherine; Barbu, Stéphanie

doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2018.04.009

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

Captive chimpanzees’ manual laterality in tool use context: Influence of communication and of sociodemographic factors

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons72904

Pika, Simone
Department of Primatology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society;

External Resource

No external resources are shared

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Prieur, J., Pika, S., Blois-Heulin, C., & Barbu, S. (2018). Captive chimpanzees’ manual laterality in tool use context: Influence of communication and of sociodemographic factors. Behavioural Processes, 157, 610-624. doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2018.04.009.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0002-B90C-1

Abstract

Understanding variations of apes’ laterality between activities is a central issue when investigating the evolutionary origins of human hemispheric specialization of manual functions and language. We assessed laterality of 39 chimpanzees in a non-communication action similar to termite fishing that we compared with data on five frequent conspecific-directed gestures involving a tool previously exploited in the same subjects. We evaluated, first, population-level manual laterality for tool-use in non-communication actions; second, the influence of sociodemographic factors (age, sex, group, and hierarchy) on manual laterality in both non-communication actions and gestures. No significant right-hand bias at the population level was found for non-communication tool use, contrary to our previous findings for gestures involving a tool. A multifactorial analysis revealed that hierarchy and age particularly modulated manual laterality. Dominants and immatures were more right-handed when using a tool in gestures than in non-communication actions. On the contrary, subordinates, adolescents, young and mature adults as well as males were more right-handed when using a tool in non-communication actions than in gestures. Our findings support the hypothesis that some primate species may have a specific left-hemisphere processing gestures distinct from the cerebral system processing non-communication manual actions and to partly support the tool use hypothesis.