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Performance on a Mirror-Drawing Task by Non-Right-HandersBraj Bhushan a , C. B. Dwivedi a , R. Mishra b &Manas K. Mandal ca Banaras Hindu University , Indiab B. R. A. Bihar University , Indiac Indian Institute of Technology , IndiaPublished online: 30 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Braj Bhushan , C. B. Dwivedi , R. Mishra & Manas K. Mandal (2000)Performance on a Mirror-Drawing Task by Non-Right-Handers, The Journal of GeneralPsychology, 127:3, 271-277, DOI: 10.1080/00221300009598585

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221300009598585

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The Journnl of General Psychology, 2000, J27(3), 271-277

Performance on a Mirror-Drawing Task by Non-Right-Handers

BRAJ BHUSHAN C. B. DWIVEDI

Banaras Hindu University, India

R. MISHRA B. R. A. Bihar University, India

MANAS K. MANDAL Indian Institute of Technology, India

ABSTRACT. Left-, mixed-, and right-handed (each n = 10, N = 30) adolescent boys who were classified on the basis of a hand preference inventory performed a mirror-drawing task with a bilateral transfer of a skill paradigm. Participants’ hand preference and the mag- nitude of bilateral transfer of skill were assessed in terms of errors Committed and time taken to complete the mirror-drawing task. Mixed-handed participants exhibited signifi- cantly less habit interference for mirror drawing, and they performed the task significant- ly faster than the left-handers did; the group difference was not significant for the fre- quency of errors committed. These groups did not differ in terms of the magnitude of bilateral transfer of skill; the trend, however, showed that the transfer of skill was mini- mum in mixed-handers. These findings extend the theory that mixed-handed participants’ inability to transfer motor skill from one hand to the other could be attributable to their lack of a clear pattern of lateralization. Their ability to perform well either at initial or later trials may be. a function of less interference from their normal motor habits.

MOST PEOPLE are right handed (about 93%; see Porac, Rees, & Buller, 1990) and show a consistency between hand preference and hand proficiency (Bishop, 1989). Speculation about inconsistency in non-right-handed (left- or mixed-hand- ed) individuals with certain forms of pathology (e.g., Geschwind & Galaburda, 1985) or without any pathology (e.g.. Cherry & Kee, 1991; Peters & Pang, 1992) has been tested on many occasions using unimanual, birnanual, and dual inter- ference tasks. Although empirical evidence indicated an inconsistency of rnanu-

Address correspondence 10 Mams K. Mandal, Department of Humanities & Social Sci- ences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India; mkm@hss.iitkgp.ernet.in (e- mail).

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212 The Journal of General Psychology

al dominance in pathological non-right-handers (e.g., dyslexia, mental retarda- tion, schizophrenia; Green, Satz, Smith, & Nelson, 1989; Mandal, Tiwari, Das, & Bryden, 1998; Nicolson & Fawcett, 1994), researchers are unsure about the nature of inconsistency in manual dominance for nonpathological non-right-han- ders (Peters, 1990). For example, many non-right-handers show a great deal of consistency between their hand performance and preference. Others show poor muscular coordination that results in accident-related injuries (Coren, 1989). It is believed that these accident-related injuries result from noncompliance with the right-sided world where everything is arranged to fit the dextral norm (Coren & Halpern, 199 1). The speculation, therefore, suggests that poor muscular coordi- nation in nonpathological non-right-handers could be caused by the deviation from dextral norm (person-environment misfit) rather than the lack of a clear pat- tern of manual dominance.

The nature of hand activity is an important factor in the determination of manual dominance. But there are great individual differences between skilled and unskilled hand activities within right-handed as well as left-handed populations (Mandal, Pandey, Singh, & Asthana, 1992; Steenhuis & Bryden, 1989). There- fore, it is important to examine manual dominance on the basis of activity-spe- cific task structure. An alternate way to examine manual dominance in individu- als is to study their ability to bilaterally transfer a manual skill (Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954) from one hand to the other. The magnitude of transfer of the manual skill may be an indicator of the consistency in terms of preference and performance, a proposition to which little attention has been paid.

In this study, we made an attempt to examine the bilateral transfer of manu- al skill in left-, mixed-, and right-handed normal participants. The study allows us to ascertain whether nonpathological non-right-handers (left- and mixed-) exhibit a normal pattern of manual dominance that is indicated by their ability to transfer a motor skill from one hand to the other. We speculated that groups with consistent hand preference (left or right) would be discriminated from inconsis- tent (mixed) hand preference. Hypothetically, the magnitude of transfer would be minimal in mixed-handers because of their lack of preferential bias for handed- ness. Any such finding would oppose the notion that non-right-handers are prone to accident-related injuries because of deviation from the dextral norm and would lend support to the view that mixed-handers without a clear pattern of lateraliza- tion (but not left-handers with a clear pattern of lateralization) are more prone to exhibit poor muscular coordination.

A mirror-drawing task was chosen to examine the bilateral transfer of skill. One of the advantages of this task is that it measures the magnitude of the bilat- eral transfer and keeps the level of performance constant (Mandal, Singh, Asthana, & Srivastava, 1992). In a mirror-drawing task, the subject has to reverse his responses to visual cues, which causes interference at the beginning of the performance. With kinesthetic appropriation to visual cues, facilitation in terms of manual skill becomes possible. Hypothetically, the interference effect during

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Bhushan, Dwivedi, Mishra, & Mandal 273

the initial stage of task performance would be significantly higher for participants with consistent hand preference.

Method

Participants

Thirty male secondary school students (mean age = 15.1 years, SD = 2.1; mean education = 9.5 years) participated in this experiment. They were selected from a pool of 278 participants and were stratified on the basis of their hand preference for unimanual activities (left-handers, n = 10; mixed-handers, n = 10; right-handers, n = 10). The three groups did not differ in terms of age or education. The primary and secondary languages of all the participants were Hindi and English, respectively, both of which are read from left to right. Participants with a history of epilepsy or hospitalization because of organic brain disorder were not included in the sample.

For determining handedness, we used a 22-item hand preference question- naire (Mandal et al., 1992). The questionnaire identified hand preference in India reliably. Studies on this issue revealed that hand preference is related to some extent to the social desirability for and cultural tolerance against certain uniman- ual activities (Ida & Bryden, 1996). In this questionnaire, participants were required to indicate their preference for a unimanual activity on a 5-point scale ( I = never, 5 = always) by left as well as right hands (e.g., throwing a ball with the left and right hand). Handedness was ascertained on the basis of Laterality Quotients (Right - Left/Right + Left, range = +1 .00 to -1.00. Bryden, 1982). The cut-off score for determining hand preference was + S O to +1.00 for right han- ders and - S O to -1.00 for left handers. Any participant falling in between was considered a mixed-hander. All left handers in the sample wrote in an inverted manner except one who wrote in a noninverted manner. None of these partici- pants had a history of hand change.

Apparatus

An electronic version of the mirror-drawing apparatus, originally developed by Starch (1910), was used for this experiment. The apparatus had a star pattern (five- pointed with an angle of 30" for each point, length 52 cm, width between inner and outer boundaries 0.4 cm) mounted on a desk with a mirror placed vertically on a specific locus of the desk that reflected the star pattern to participants. A metal pointer, attached to an electronic counter device, was used to trace the star pattern.

Procedure

Participants were instructed to trace the metallic star pattern within its inner and outer boundaries with a fine-pointed stylus while looking at the mirror. The

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direct vision to the star pattern was obstructed by a screen. Each participant traced the star pattern 25 times, 5 trials with the preferred hand (pre), followed by 15 tri- als with the nonpreferred hand (interpolated), and 5 trials with the preferred hand (post). The participants’ scores were based on the time taken to trace the star pat- tern (response time) and errors committed (response accuracy). In each trial, an error was counted when the inner or outer boundary of the star pattern was touched during tracing. An electronic counter was attached to the device to count errors automatically. In case the participant got stuck and ended up leaving and re-enter- ing the track repeatedly at the same location, errors were counted additively for the number of times the stylus touched the boundaries of the star pattern.

Participants were not allowed to lift the stylus, and the metallic boundaries did not allow them to move out of the track very easily. The star pattern could be traced clockwise or counterclockwise-there was no directional restriction. How- ever, they were required to keep the nonworking hand free because unrelated activity during the tracing might interfere with bilateral transfer of skill (Hicks, Gualtieri, & Schroeder, 1983). Left- and right-handers used their left and right hand, respectively, as their preferred hand. All but one mixed-hander used their right hand as the preferred hand. Preferred use of hand was left to the participants.

Results

Performance of the groups (left-, mixed-, and right-handed) measured by errors committed (response accuracy) and time taken to trace the star pattern (response latency) for the first five trials (pre) and the last five trials (post) with the preferred hand are shown in Table 1.

Data were analyzed, separately for the two dependent measures, with a 3 (Groups: left-, mixed-, right-handed) x 2 (Conditions: pre, post) factorial mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures on the Condition factor. Analysis of response accuracy data revealed a nonsignificant main effect of Group and a nonsignificant interaction of Group x Condition. The main effect of Condition was significant, F(1, 27) = 43.04, p c .001, indicating that the errors committed in the postcondition were less when compared with the precondition. Analysis of response latency data showed a significant main effect of Group, F(2, 27) = 6.92, p < .W. The interaction of Group x Condition failed to reach a tra- ditional level of significance, F(2,27) = 3.22, p = ,056. However, descriptive data indicated that mixed-handed participants performed their task in relatively less time than did the left- but not the right-handed participants (see Table 1). The one- way ANOVA for the precondition data showed that the initial interference pro- duced by the task structure was minimum for mixed-handers, followed by right- and left-handers, F(2, 27) = 5.32, p c .01.

The percentage of bilateral transfer of skill for the two dependent measures was calculated for each participant by the following formula (Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954):

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Bhushan, Dwivedi, Mishra, & Mandal 275

TABLE 1 Means and Standard Deviations for Frequency of Errors Committed and Time Taken to Accomplish the Mirror-Drawing Task and the Percentage of Bilateral

Transfer in Left-, Mixed-, and Right-Handed Participants

Frequency of Time taken errors committed (in s)

First 5 Last 5 First 5 Last 5 % transfer Group trials trials trials trials Error Time

Left- handed M 65.82 27.84 69.93 23.11 53.81 58.21 SD 23.2 4.9 30.9 7.7 14.5 26.2

M 47.92 24.81 29.29 13.83 38.10 41.24 SD 25.4 10.6 19.6 8.6 25.8 24.3

M 64.88 30.60 53.22 18.94 45.54 52.68 SD 36.6 8.8 33.1 8.6 20.7 25.9

Mixed- handed

Right-handed

Nore. Each group, n = 10; N = 30.

(First 5 trials - last 5 trials) x 100 First 5 trials

The group difference was examined separately for the two dependent mea- sures. Findings indicated a nonsignificant group difference for both the measures. Although the group difference was nonsignificant, the trend in the data showed that mixed-handers had the least overall transfer of skill, followed by right- and left-handers (see Table 1).

A multiple discriminant function analysis was carried out with the pre- and postexperiment measures of two dependent variables, response accuracy and response latency, for the three groups. It was found that mixed-handers (9 out of 10) could be reliably discriminated on the basis of these measures; one mixed- hander was misclassified as a right-hander (Wilks’s h = S02, p < .025). Left- and right-handed participants could not be reliably discriminated on the basis of the magnitude of bilateral transfer of skill.

Discussion

The findings suggest that mixed-handed participants (a) showed less inter- ference from the nature of the (mirror-drawing) task when compared with left- or right-handed participants, (b) took less time to trace the star pattern in either the pre- or postexperiment condition than did the left-handers, and (c) had the mini-

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276 The Journal of General Psychology

mum bilateral transfer of skill (although nonsignificant) when compared with the left- or right-handed participants.

In a mirror-drawing task, reversal of visual image causes interference with eye-hand coordination. Because the normal way of drawing the star pattern is abandoned and the new eye-hand coordination is habit-interfered (Biswas, Haque-Nizamie, Pandey, & Mandal, 1996), participants with a clear hand pref- erence (left or right) take more time to undo their prior learning to become kines- thetically attuned to the reversed visual image. Mixed-handers, however, have less habit interference with their performance because their learned pattern is not rein- forced by a preferential bias for handedness. Accuracy of performance, therefore, remains unaffected in mixed-handers. The findings equivocally suggest that mixed-handed participants tended to show superior eye-hand coordination in a mirror-drawing task. In fact, superiority in eye-hand coordination is a result of less interference from normal motoric habit, rather than faster learning of new eye-hand coordination. In a sense, the normal inverse relationship of speed and accuracy for task performance is not typical of mixed-handers.

The magnitude of bilateral transfer is lowest in mixed-handed participants; their movement is less interfered with by the nature of task. These findings can be explained by the fact that the low level of transfer in the mixed-handed partic- ipants was attributable to their superior performance on the first five trials, which was already close to optimal. It is possible that the magnitude of bilateral trans- fer is proportional to the degree of habit interference. Such a relationship cannot be tested because of a nonsignificant group difference in terms of the magnitude of bilateral transfer. Despite this nonsignificant group difference (which might be the result of the heterogeneity of within-group performance; see Table l), the trend in the findings reveals that bilateral transfer of skill is greater with clear lat- eral bias. Because we have no empirical support to substantiate the magnitude of transfer of skill in mixed-handed participants, it would be premature to link this finding with their nature of lateral organization.

The results of this study, therefore, simply argue in favor of a possibility that mixed-handed people may be discriminated (as evident from the discriminant function analysis of data) from left- or right-handed people by their performance on a mirror-drawing task and indices of bilateral transfer of skill. These measures, however, do not reveal consistency in left-handers.

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