Hemispheric asymmetry of a wide range of functions is a hallmark of the human brain. The visual system has traditionally been thought of as symmetrically distributed in the brain, but a growing body of evidence has challenged this view. Some highly specific visual tasks have been shown to depend on hemispheric specialization. However, the possible lateralization of cerebral responses to a simple checkerboard visual stimulation has not been a focus of previous studies. To investigate this, we performed two sessions of blood-oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 54 healthy subjects during stimulation with a black and white checkerboard visual stimulus. While carefully excluding possible non-physiological causes of left-to-right bias, we compared the activation of the left and the right cerebral hemispheres and related this to grey matter volume, handedness, age, gender, ocular dominance, interocular difference in visual acuity, as well as line-bisection performance. We found a general lateralization of cerebral activation towards the right hemisphere of early visual cortical areas and areas of higher-level visual processing, involved in visuospatial attention, especially in top-down (i.e., goal-oriented) attentional processing. This right hemisphere lateralization was partly, but not completely, explained by an increased grey matter volume in the right hemisphere of the early visual areas. Difference in activation of the superior parietal lobule was correlated with subject age, suggesting a shift towards the left hemisphere with increasing age. Our findings suggest a right-hemispheric dominance of these areas, which could lend support to the generally observed leftward visual attentional bias and to the left hemifield advantage for some visual perception tasks.
The grey matter of the human brain is asymmetrically distributed between the cerebral hemispheres. This asymmetry includes visual areas, but its relevance to visual function is not understood. Voxel-based morphometry is a well-established technique for localization and quantification of cerebral grey matter on the basis of MR images. This method has been used previously for interhemispheric comparison, but without examining the functional implications of the identified anatomical asymmetries of the visual system. The aim of the present study was to relate anatomical interhemispheric asymmetries to asymmetries of visual function. We examined grey matter asymmetries of visual areas in a large population (n=56) of ophthalmologically and neurologically healthy individuals. We used state-of-the-art 3 T MRI and voxel-based morphometry to relate the visual parameters, (a) ocular dominance, (b) interocular difference in visual acuity and (c) visual attention (i.e. deviation on a line-bisection task), to interhemispheric differences in grey matter volume. As most visual input from one eye is processed in the contralateral hemisphere, ocular features may also depend on cerebral lateralization. Several lateralized visual areas were identified, both right>left and left>right. When correlating the asymmetries to the functional parameters, we found a significant correlation to ocular dominance (P<0.05), whereas visual acuity and visual attention showed no such relationship. The lateral occipital complex was identified to be significantly larger in the left hemisphere for right-eyed participants and vice versa. These results suggest a cerebral basis for ocular dominance.
Increased core body temperature was accompanied by improved temporal visual resolution and retinal trunk vessel dilation. The results suggest that hyperthermia is associated with enhanced retinal function and increased retinal metabolism.
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