Assessment of handedness using a digitizing tablet: a new method

The assessment of handedness is of interest in some psychiatric populations , above all in schizophrenic patients, because there may be a relationship between neurodevelopmental, hemispheric damage and psychiatric disease proc esses (Crow TJ. Schizophrenia Bulletin 1990;16:433-443; Tyler M, Diamond J, Lewis S. Schizophrenia Research 1995;18:37-41). Various methods to assess handedness have been proposed. In order to detect the most precise instrume nt for the assessment of handedness, two different measures. a questionnair e and a computational procedure for movement analysis, were compared in a g roup of healthy subjects. The ability of the methods to discriminate not on ly between the groups of right-handers (n = 12) and left-handers (n = 23), but also between left-handers trained in school to use the non-dominant rig ht hand ('inconsistent' left-handers; n = 11) and those allowed to use thei r left hand for writing ('consistent' left-handers; n = 12) was investigate d. For future investigations, our main concern was to determine if one meth od had superiority over the other. The results revealed that the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (EHI) distinguishes just as well as the computational method between right-handers and non-right-handers. However, more precise d iscrimination between the subgroups of 'consistent' and 'inconsistent' left -handers is possible using digitized analysis of hand-motor performance. Ac cording to our results handedness should be assessed not only with the EHI, but also with the computer-aided analysis of hand-movements. (C) 2001 Else vier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.