Editorial: Hand and Touch: Evolution, Ability, and Preference

Seeing Touches Early in Life

The sense of touch provides fundamental information about the surrounding world, and feedback about our own actions. Although touch is very important during the earliest stages of life, to date no study has investigated infants' abilities to process visual stimuli implying touch. This study explores the developmental origins of the ability to visually recognize touching gestures involving other...

Editorial: Could Speciation Across Evolution be Governed by Genetic Switch Codes at Short Tandem Repeats?

Fetal laterality and maternal stress

This longitudinal observational study investigated whether fetuses change their hand preference with gestational age, and also examined the effects of maternal stress on lateralized fetal self-touch. Following ethical approval, fifteen healthy fetuses (8 girls and 7 boys), were scanned four times from 24-36 weeks gestation. Self-touch behaviours which resulted in a touch of the fetal face/head ...

Preference Value Evaluation of Rangeland Plant Species for Kaboudeh Sheep

Study on the livestock diet is one of the main priorities in the management of rangeland in Iran. So, this study was conducted to compare preference values of plant species in three age classes of Kaboudeh sheep (one, three and five year old ones) in rangelands of Bavanat, Fars province, Iran. For each age class, four sheep were selected and their grazing times from different plant species were...

Grasping without Sight: Insights from the Congenitally Blind

We reach for and grasp different sized objects numerous times per day. Most of these movements are visually-guided, but some are guided by the sense of touch (i.e. haptically-guided), such as reaching for your keys in a bag, or for an object in a dark room. A marked right-hand preference has been reported during visually-guided grasping, particularly for small objects. However, little is known ...