This volume adds new dimension and organization to the literature of touch and the hand, covering a diversity of topics surrounding the perception and cognition of touch in relation to the hand. No animal species compare to humans with regard to the haptic (or touch) sense, so unlike visual or auditory cognition, we know little about such haptic cognition. We do know that motor skills play a major role in haptics, but senses like vision do not determine hand preference or hand ability. It seems also that the potential ability to perform a task may be present in both hands and evidence indicates that the hand used to perform tactile tasks in blind or in sighted conditions is independent of one’s hand preference. This book will be useful for those in education and robotics and can serve as a general text focusing on touch and developmental psychology.

Genes and kangaroos -- Criminals or victims? Cesare Lombroso vs. Robert Hertz -- By the numbers : measuring handedness -- Ambiguous attitudes -- Changing hands, tying tongues -- From genes to populations : the search for a cause -- The geschwind hypothesis -- Genetic models and selective advantage -- Uniquely human? -- A gay hand? -- Disability, ability, and the left hand -- Conclusion : does left-handedness matter?

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000229 EndHTML:0000004007 StartFragment:0000002898 EndFragment:0000003971 SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/rhodaperhardt/Documents/Business%20docs/Publications/HandPrefBook/HandPrefDescription.doc This book is for therapists, teachers, and parents who are trying to answer these questions: What are the most important things we need to know about hand preference, and its relevance to function? What can we do to help a child who has problems with functional skills such as handwriting, which may or may not relate to inconsistent handedness? Highlights: Theoretical Concepts, Normal Components of Hand Preference, Testing Methods, Identification of Functional Problems and Practical Interventions, CD-Rom, including the Erhardt Hand Preference Assessment (EHPA), the EHPA-S (Short Screening Form), and the Documentation of Hand Preference and Quality of Performance, to print unlimited copies for clinical or educational purposes

Motor skills are a vital part of healthy development and are featured prominently both in physical examinations and in parents’ baby diaries. It has been known for a long time that motor development is critical for children’s understanding of the physical and social world. Learning occurs through dynamic interactions and exchanges with the physical and the social world, and consequently movements of eyes and head, arms and legs, and the entire body are a critical during learning. At birth, we start with relatively poorly developed motor skills but soon gain eye and head control, learn to reach, grasp, sit, and eventually to crawl and walk on our own. The opportunities arising from each of these motor milestones are profound and open new and exciting possibilities for exploration and interactions, and learning. Consequently, several theoretical accounts of child development suggest that growth in cognitive, social, and perceptual domains are influences by infants’ own motor experiences. Recently, empirical studies have started to unravel the direct impact that motor skills may have other domains of development. This volume is part of this renewed interest and includes reviews of previous findings and recent empirical evidence for associations between the motor domain and other domains from leading researchers in the field of child development. We hope that these articles will stimulate further research on this interesting question.

Manual Specialization and the Developing Brain deals with how the hands acquire different skills and what this may tell about the child's developing brain. This book is organized into three parts. Part I provides a general overview of lateralization development, while Part II compiles contributions that are more theoretical in nature. The last part summarizes the empirical research with neonates. This text specifically discusses the studies of early lateralized manual behaviors, character of human handedness, and factors that contribute toward variability in lateralization. The hemisphere differences in response to specific stimulus cues, phylogenetic perspective, and infant motor skills project are also elaborated. This text likewise covers the developmental view of hemispheric specialization and changes and constancies in development. This publication is useful to pediatricians, medical practitioners, and researchers concerned with early lateralized behavior.

Whereas the cerebral specialization for skilled manual actions (praxis) seems closely linked to dominance for language, with both functions left lateralized in the vast majority of humans, the neural correlates of hand preference are still less well understood. Indeed, as a combination of inherited and non-inherited genomic factors (i.e., direct parental and concealed environmental contributions), handedness – in contrast to language – is less likely to have strong genetic indices and clearly lateralized functional organization. What about eye dominance, unimanual and bimanual object manipulation, and gestures, or attentional systems and the related egocentric or allocentric coding of space? Are these different categories functionally and structurally interconnected? Is their development and contribution to task performance linked, even if they are differently lateralized? How are they connected to language learning or its development? In trying to understand these relationships and their neural underpinnings we obtain a new insight into fundamental human behaviors, which depend either on shared or distinct cerebral resources that must, nevertheless, be harmonized by higher-order cerebral processing. In this Research Topic we assembled a dozen of original research contributions, as well as articles with more theoretically-driven perspectives, that directly speak to these issues. Hopefully this work will serve as a foundation for further discussions and will stimulate new research in this fascinating domain.

Left-right asymmetries of structure and function are a common organization principle in the brains of humans and non-human vertebrates alike. While there are inherently asymmetric systems such as the human language system or the song system of songbirds, the impact of structural or functional asymmetries on perception, cognition and behavior is not necessarily limited to these systems. For example, performance in experimental paradigms that assess executive functions such as inhibition, planning or action monitoring is influenced by information processing in the bottom-up channel. Depending on the type of stimuli used, one hemisphere can be more efficient in processing than the other and these functional cerebral asymmetries have been shown to modulate the efficacy of executive functions via the bottom-up channel. We only begin to understand the complex neuronal mechanisms underlying this interaction between hemispheric asymmetries and cognitive systems. Therefore, it is the aim of this Research Topics to further elucidate how structural or functional hemispheric asymmetries modulate perception, cognition and behavior in the broadest sense.