Human lateral preferences, such as handedness and footedness, have interested researchers for decades due to their pronounced asymmetries at population level. While there are good estimates on the prevalence of handedness in the population, there is, to this, day no large-scale estimation on the prevalence of footedness. Furthermore, the relationship between footedness and handedness still remains elusive. Here, we conducted meta-analyses with four different classification systems for footedness on 145,150 individuals across 164 studies including new data from the ALSPAC cohort. The aims of the study were to determine a reliable point estimate of footedness, to study the association between footedness and handedness, and to investigate moderating factors influencing footedness. We showed that the prevalence of atypical footedness ranges between 12.10% using the most conservative criterion of left-footedness to 23.7% including all left- and mixed-footers as a single non-right category. As many as 60.1% of left-handers were left-footed whereas only 3.2% of right-handers were left-footed. Males were 4.1% more often non-right-footed compared to females. Individuals with psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders exhibited a higher prevalence of non-right-footedness. Furthermore, the presence of mixed-footedness was higher in children compared to adults as well as in experienced athletes compared to the general population. Finally, we showed that footedness is only marginally influenced by cultural and social factors, which have been shown to play a crucial role in the determination of handedness. Overall, this study provides new and useful reference data for laterality research. Furthermore, the data suggest that footedness is a valuable phenotype for the study of lateral motor biases, its underlying genetics and neurodevelopment.
Effects Of Large-Scale Structure Upon The Determination Of Ho From Time Delays
