ORIGINAL PAPER Hand preference and its flexibility according to the position of the object: a study in cercopithecines examining spontaneous behaviour and an experimental task (the Bishop QHP task) Amandine Chapelain • Agathe Laurence • Marie Vimond • Audrey Maille • He´le`ne Meunier • Jacqueline Fagard • Jacques Vauclair • Catherine Blois-Heulin Received: 22 September 2011 / Revised: 23 May 2012 / Accepted: 23 May 2012 / Published online: 21 June 2012 Ó Springer-Verlag 2012 Abstract The extant literature on manual laterality in non-human primates is inconclusive, plagued by inconsis- tent or contradictory findings and by disturbing methodo- logical issues (e.g. uncontrolled influential factors, comparability issues). The present study examined hand preference and its flexibility in 15 red-capped mangabeys (C. t. torquatus) and 13 Campbell’s monkeys (C. c. camp- belli), two species that differ in their degree of arboreality. We investigated the influence of the spatial position of the object on hand preference for reaching. We considered spontaneous behaviour (reaching for food during daily feeding) and an experimental task: the QHP task. The QHP is a task that is used in humans. This is a simple reaching task that involves high spatial constraints on hand use. In our study, the subject had to reach for items that were placed on a semi-circle in front of it on five positions, including in the centre position, in the ipsilateral space and in the con- tralateral space. We assessed hand preference for reaching in front (baseline condition), and we examined how this preference changed when reaching in lateral positions. For reaching in front, about half of the subjects were lateralized and no group-level bias occurred, for both spontaneous and experimental conditions. When considering reaching in the lateral positions, we observed that the position of the object influenced hand use: individuals used the hand that was closest to the object. The results are discussed in relation to previous findings in humans and in non-human primates and regarding theories on handedness and flexibility of hand preference. Keywords Handedness Á Manual preference Á Monkeys Á Spatial constraints on hand use Á Reaching Introduction In humans, most individuals exhibit a hand preference, with very few individuals being unlateralized (3 %) (Annett 1985; Fagard 2004; Faurie and Raymond 2004; Vuoksimaa et al. 2009). The majority of humans usually or always use the same hand for most unimanual activities and for the most active component in bimanual activities. This hand preference is thought to be related to brain lat- eralization, although the hand chosen can also be influ- enced by spatial (Leconte and Fagard 2004) and cultural (Dahmen and Fagard 2005) constraints. Around 80–90 % percent of the individuals are right handed (Annett 1985; Fagard 2004; Faurie and Raymond 2004; review in McManus 2002). This extreme group-level bias is present in all cultures around the world (Coren and Porac 1977; Fagard 2004; Marchant et al. 1995; Marchant and McGrew 1998; Raymond and Pontier 2004), and archaeological evidence indicates that it would be an ancient trait in the A. Chapelain (&) Á A. Laurence Á M. Vimond Á A. Maille Á C. Blois-Heulin ETHOS, Universite´ de Rennes 1, CNRS UMR 6552, Station Biologique de Paimpont, 35380 Paimpont, France e-mail: chapelain_amandine@yahoo.fr H. Meunier Centre de Primatologie, Universite´ de Strasbourg, Fort Foch, 67207 Niederhausbergen, France J. Fagard Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS UMR 8158, Universite´ Paris Descartes, Centre Biome´dical des Saints Pe`res, 45 rue des Saints Pe`res, 75270 Paris cedex 06, France J. Vauclair Research Center in the Psychology of Cognition, Language and Emotion, Universite´ de Provence, 29 Avenue Robert Schuman, 13621 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 1, France 123 Anim Cogn (2012) 15:937–953 DOI 10.1007/s10071-012-0520-z