In the elite domain of interactive sports, athletes who demonstrate a left preference (e.g., holding a weapon with the left hand in fencing or boxing in a ‘southpaw’ stance) seem overrepresented. Such excess indicates a performance advantage and was also interpreted as evidence in favour of frequency-dependent selection mechanisms to explain the maintenance of left-handedness in humans. To test for an overrepresentation, the incidence of athletes' lateral preferences is typically compared with an expected ratio of left- to right-handedness in the normal population. However, the normal population reference values did not always relate to the sport-specific tasks of interest, which may limit the validity of reports of an excess of ‘left-oriented’ athletes. Here we sought to determine lateral preferences for various sport-specific tasks (e.g., baseball batting, boxing) in the normal population and to examine the relationship between these preferences and handedness. To this end, we asked 903 participants to indicate their lateral preferences for sport-specific and common tasks using a paper-based questionnaire. Lateral preferences varied considerably across the different sport tasks and we found high variation in the relationship between those preferences and handedness. In contrast to unimanual tasks (e.g., fencing or throwing), for bimanually controlled actions such as baseball batting, shooting in ice hockey or boxing the incidence of left preferences was considerably higher than expected from the proportion of left-handedness in the normal population and the relationship with handedness was relatively low. We conclude that (i) task-specific reference values are mandatory for reliably testing for an excess of athletes with a left preference, (ii) the term ‘handedness’ should be more cautiously used within the context of sport-related laterality research and (iii) observation of lateral preferences in sports may be of limited suitability for the verification of evolutionary theories of handedness.

Numbers and percentages of consistent left-handers (CLH), inconsistent left-handers (ILH), ambidexter with a tendency towards left-handedness (ALH), ambidexter with a tendency towards right-handedness (ARH), inconsistent right-handers (IRH) and consistent right-handers (CRH) for the combined PCSK6 rs10523972 alleles.

Chiral groups attached to the end of quinoline-derived oligoamide foldamers give rise to chiral helical induction in solution. Using various chiral groups, diastereomeric excesses ranging from 9% to 83% could be measured by NMR and circular dichroism. Despite these relatively weak values and the fact that diastereomeric helices coexist and interconvert in solution, the right-handed or left-handed helical sense favored by the terminal chiral group could be determined unambiguously using X-ray crystallography. Assignment of chiral induction was performed in an original way using the strong tendency of racemates to cocrystallize, and taking advantage of slow helix inversion rates, which allowed one to establish that the stereomers observed in the crystals do correspond to the major stereomers in solution. The sense of chiral helical induction was rationalized on the basis of sterics. Upon assigning an Rs or Ss chirality to the stereogenic center using a nomenclature where the four substituents are ranked according to decreasing sizes, it is observed that Rs chirality always favors left-handed helicity and Ss chirality favors right-handed helicity (P). X-ray structures shed some light on the role of sterics in the mechanism of chiral induction. The preferred conformation at the stereocenter is apparently one where the bulkiest group should preferentially point away from the helix, the second largest group should be aligned with the helix backbone, and the smallest should point to the helix.

Mean RTs (in ms), with standard errors (in parentheses), percentages of accuracy, for left and right handed participants, separated by response hand (left, right), target location (left target, right target), and cue validity (valid, invalid).