What Underlies a Greater Reversal in Tactile Temporal Order Judgment when the Hands Are Crossed? A Structural MRI Study

Ali Moharramipour, Shigeru Kitazawa
2021 Cerebral Cortex Communications  
Our subjective temporal order of two successive tactile stimuli delivered one to each hand is often inverted when our hands are crossed. However, there is great variability among different individuals. We addressed the question of why some show almost complete reversal, but others show little reversal. To this end, we obtained structural MRI data from 42 participants who also participated in the tactile temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. We extracted the cortical thickness and the convoluted
more » ... rface area as cortical characteristics in 68 regions. We found that the participants with a thinner, larger, and more convoluted cerebral cortex in ten regions, including the right pars-orbitalis, right and left postcentral gyri, left precuneus, left superior parietal lobule, right middle temporal gyrus, left superior temporal gyrus, right cuneus, left supramarginal gyrus, and right rostral middle frontal gyrus showed a smaller degree of judgment reversal. In light of major theoretical accounts, we suggest that cortical elaboration in the aforementioned regions improve the crossed-hand TOJ performance through better integration of the tactile stimuli with the correct spatial representations in the left parietal regions, better representation of spatial information in the postcentral gyrus, or improvement of top-down inhibitory control by the right pars-orbitalis.
doi:10.1093/texcom/tgab025 pmid:34296170 pmcid:PMC8152922 fatcat:o4qhqa4nbfanhcgkclziccfpve