Wait wait,don't tell me: Handedness questionnaires do not predict hand preference for grasping

Handedness questionnaires are a common screening tool in psychology and neuroscience, used whenever a participant's performance on a given task may conceivably be affected by their laterality. Two widely-used examples of such questionnaires are the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory and the Waterloo Handedness Questionnaire. Both instruments ask respondents to report their hand preference for performing a variety of common tasks (e.g., throwing a ball, or opening a drawer). Here we combined questions from the two instruments (E-WHQ; 22 questions total) and asked participants to report their preferred hand for each via a five-point scale. The purpose of this study was to determine whether responses on the E-WHQ are accurate, reliable, and/or predictive of hand-preference for a simple grasp-to-construct task. Regarding accuracy, handedness scores were 5% lower when participants used a scrambled response key versus a consistent one. Test-retest reliability of the questionnaire was weak, with any given inventory item eliciting a different response from 34% of respondents upon retesting. Neither was the E-WHQ predictively useful—although both left- and right-handers preferred their dominant hands, E-WHQ score did not correlate with overall percentage of dominant-hand grasps in either group. We conclude that the E-WHQ is unsuited for predicting hand preference for grasping.