Handedness between bodies: toward a relational account of manual laterality

Papadatou-Pastou and colleagues’ rapid review maps 47 named tasks comparing the relative skill of the two hands. From a relational perspective, most tasks assess a person acting alone. This provides a baseline, but not a complete account of how manual asymmetry is expressed. Evidence that hand choice and attributed handedness vary with target animacy, communicative purpose, partner role, emotional context, or viewpoint raises a further question: can relative hand performance also change when the same or a matched action is embedded in a social context? We use relational handedness to denote systematic variation in hand choice or relative hand performance generated or modulated by an actor’s relation to a partner or observer, given a social goal and spatial arrangement. Attributed handedness addresses the neighboring question of how the observer–agent relation shapes perceived manual laterality and helps identify relational variables to manipulate. Relational handedness is not a third score alongside preference and skill, but a testing condition potentially assessing their contextual stability. Future batteries could pair validated individual tasks with matched social and nonsocial conditions and test the hand-by-condition interaction. This would preserve the distinction between preference and skill while separating task noise from meaningful relational modulation.