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Preliminary study on hand preference in captive northern white-cheeked gibbons (Nomascus leucogenys)

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Abstract

The postural origin hypothesis and the task complexity hypothesis propose that hand preference in non-human primates evolved in association with body posture and task complexity, respectively. The results of previous studies testing these two hypotheses, however, vary greatly with the different primate species and methods used. To investigate the effect of body posture and task complexity on hand preference, we recorded bouts of hand usage in nine captive northern white-cheeked gibbons (Nomascus leucogenys) housed at Beijing Zoo as they reached for food items in a ground-reaching task, a box task, and a tube task. The results showed that four to seven of the nine gibbons displayed a hand preference at the individual level in different tasks, and that hand preference in individuals was task-specific; there was no group-level hand preference in any task. The box task seemed to elicit a greater strength of hand preference than the ground-reaching task at the individual level. Although the small sample size rules out drawing any strong conclusions concerning hand preference at the group level, our results suggest that the suspensory reaching posture might increase the expression of hand preference at the individual level. This study provides preliminary information on hand preference in captive northern white-cheeked gibbons, and will be helpful for future studies addressing the origin and evolution of hand preference in small apes.

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Acknowledgments

We thank zookeepers Haibo Zhang, Jing Le, Jingle Li, Jing Yan, Haiyang Xu, and Yali Song for assisting with our study at Beijing Zoo. We thank Prof. Zhendong Cao for valuable suggestions, and Prof. David Shepherdson, Prof. Robert Young and Dr Margaret Hawkins for their helpful suggestions and for editing this manuscript. This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31472009) and the Department of Wildlife Conservation and Nature Reserve Management, State Forestry Administration, People’s Republic of China (Grant No. 2010).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ministry of Education, Key Laboratory of Biodiversity Science and Ecological Engineering, College of Life Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Penglai Fan, Chanyuan Liu, Hongyi Chen & Dingzhen Liu

  2. Beijing Key Laboratory of Captive Wildlife Technologies in Beijing Zoo, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Xuefeng Liu & Jinguo Zhang

  3. College of Life Sciences, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China

    Dapeng Zhao

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  1. Penglai Fan
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  2. Chanyuan Liu
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  3. Hongyi Chen
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  4. Xuefeng Liu
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  6. Jinguo Zhang
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  7. Dingzhen Liu
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Correspondence to Dingzhen Liu.

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All procedures performed in studies involving animals were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institution or practice at which the studies were conducted. All applicable international, national, and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed. This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.

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Fan, P., Liu, C., Chen, H. et al. Preliminary study on hand preference in captive northern white-cheeked gibbons (Nomascus leucogenys). Primates 58, 75–82 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-016-0573-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-016-0573-8

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