Annett, M. K. & Bischof, W. F. (2013). Your left hand can do it too! Leveraging intermanual, symmetirc transfer on touchscreens. ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1119-1128.

This work examines intermanual gesture transfer, i.e., learning a gesture with one hand and performing it with the other. Using a traditional retention and transfer paradigm from the motor learning literature, participants learned four gestures on a touchscreen. The study found that touchscreen gestures transfer, and do so symmetrically. Regardless of the hand used during training, gestures were performed with a comparable level of error and speed by the untrained hand, even after 24 hours. In addition, the form of a gesture, i.e., its length or curvature, was found to have no influence on transferability. These results have important implications for the design of stroke-based ges-tural interfaces: acquisition could occur with either hand and it is possible to interchange the hand used to perform gestures. The work concludes with a discussion of these implications and highlights how they can be applied to ges-ture learning and current gestural systems.

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