alt Hacker NewsThere is also a category of people who are “mixed-handed”, who have a strong handedness preference for a given task, but which hand one prefers varies based on the task. I didn’t know about this category until recently, but it describes my personal experience.
Mildly informative Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-dominance
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I'm like that, except for those things I can do both ways, because it's useful and sometimes necessary - like using a shovel. There are a bunch of things I only do with either the left hand only, or the right hand only. A right-handed friend always throw balls with his left hand. Most other things he does with his right hand.
I'm right-handed. I'm definitely sure of that. It's just that what hand I use depends on which hand I start with from the beginning. And that'll be the preferred hand, except for things where it's natural to switch from the very beginning.
But there are also some things I've learned to do with both hands much later, e.g. washing dishes - there was a reason for having to do that for a while, and now I just switch when I like it, or if the kitchen happens to be arranged in a way which makes one side more preferable.
(BTW, when building carpenters still used common hammers it was completely normal to use either hand, as access space may be limited and there's basically no choice sometimes.)
Interesting, but it confuses me a bit.
Ambidextrous means: "that the person has no marked preference for the use of the right or left hand".
Unlike what is normally assumed, it doesn't mean you've mastered both hands, it doesn't imply you can write equally well with the left or the right, but that you could have just as easily learned either. You had no marked preference when you picked up the activity initially.
Cross-dominance seem to imply there was a marked preference, but that it is the left or right hand differs per activity.
That said, I wonder if they're really the same. Often people say ambidextrous as you are equally good with both hands, which would always require practice on both side. But maybe cross-dominant people can equally learn?
Under that reading, cross-dominance could be what ambidexterity actually looks like in practice. If you genuinely have no preference, there's no reason you'd consistently land on the same hand across all activities, you'd be influenced by context, who taught you, which hand was free, etc.
Have you ever tried your other hand at activities? And are you surprisingly good with it, even if not as good? I tend to be better using my other hand at most things than say a fully right handed person, but never as good as the hand I've been using for that activity consistently.