Short and long-term temporal consistency of hand preference in sanctuary chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) for unimanual and bimanual coordinated tasks

Abstract Longitudinal research on manual preferences in humans and non-human primates has mainly been conducted from a developmental perspective, with only a few studies exploring long-term stability of this trait during adulthood. Therefore, we investigated short-term (1 year) and long-term (10 and 11 years) consistency of hand preference in a naturalistic group of 19 juvenile and adult chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) by using two experimental tasks, one unimanual (simple reaching) and one bimanual (tube task). The experimental sessions were conducted in 2007, 2008 and 2018. We found that the direction of hand preference (right vs. left) in the tube task remained stable after both short-time and long-time periods. Conversely, hand preference direction for simple reaching was not consistent after the longest period (11 years), but the handedness indices (HI) between 2007 and 2008 (1-year period) and between 2008 and 2018 (10-year period) were positively correlated. The comparison between tasks confirmed that all the chimpanzees were more strongly lateralised for the tube task. Interestingly, however, the strength of hand preference in the tube task showed an increasing trend in the long term. We hypothesize that this could be a consequence of practice and experience with a particular motor action.