The difference in cortical activation pattern for complex motor skills: A functional near- infrared spectroscopy study

Abstract

The human brain is lateralized to dominant or non-dominant hemispheres, and controlled through large-scale neural networks between correlated cortical regions. Recently, many neuroimaging studies have been conducted to examine the origin of brain lateralization, but this is still unclear. In this study, we examined the differences in brain activation in subjects according to dominant and non-dominant hands while using chopsticks. Fifteen healthy right-handed subjects were recruited to perform tasks which included transferring almonds using stainless steel chopsticks. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to acquire the hemodynamic response over the primary sensory-motor cortex (SM1), premotor area (PMC), supplementary motor area (SMA), and frontal cortex. We measured the concentrations of oxy-hemoglobin and deoxy-hemoglobin induced during the use of chopsticks with dominant and non-dominant hands. While using the dominant hand, brain activation was observed on the contralateral side. While using the non-dominant hand, brain activation was observed on the ipsilateral side as well as the contralateral side. These results demonstrate dominance and functional asymmetry of the cerebral hemisphere.

Brain-Based Binary Communication Using Spatiotemporal Features of fNIRS Responses

“…In the current study, three left-handed participants, i.e., participants 5, 17, and 18, were asked to perform motor imagery with their non-dominant hand. Given the established hemispheric asymmetry related to handedness (Maruff et al, 1999;Lee et al, 2019;Yokoyama et al, 2019), it is plausible that left hand imagery combined with right hemisphere fNIRS recordings would have resulted in heightened BCI decoding accuracies for these three participants. When excluding these three participants from our univariate analyses, single-trial accuracies rose to 58.44% (HbO) and 58.00% (HbR), previously 56.85 and 54.81%.…”

Characterizing hemodynamic response alterations during basketball dribbling

“…These studies suggest, that task complexity is an important feature which systematically changes neural activation during movement execution. Task complexity can be varied on many different levels, for example by increasing or reducing pace of execution [5][6][7][8] but also by experimentally inducing laterality effects [3,4,[9][10][11].…”

“…Furthermore, we expected (b) lower hemodynamic responses during slow dribbling as compared to fast dribbling conditions [5,7,20]. Considering laterality effects, we hypothesized that (c) dribbling with the dominant right hand (DH) induces lower ipsilateral hemodynamic responses compared to dribbling with the non-dominant left hand (NDH) [3,10,11], and that (d) dribbling with DH induces lower hemodynamic responses compared to dribbling with alternating hands (AH). Additionally, we hypothesized that (e) the amount of change in hemodynamic responses would relate to the perceived level of task complexity.…”

Hemispheric asymmetry in hand preference of right-handers for passive vibrotactile perception: an fNIRS study

“…These results coincided with other transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies describing a greater degree of hemispheric asymmetry in right-handers, who are typically more strongly lateralized than left-handers 13,14 . Our functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study of cortical activation for hand preference of right-handers when performing a chopstick manipulation supported that preferred hand showed stronger cortically lateralized than less-preferred hand 15 .…”

“…Haptic perception accompanies cutaneous perception, that is, sensory information coded by cutaneous and proprioceptive mechanoreceptors is transmitted to the central nervous system by two separate major ascending pathways. On the aforementioned evidences of the hemispheric asymmetry of right-handers in haptic perception [10][11][12][13][14][15] and the clue of the hemispheric asymmetry of right-handers in cutaneous perception 18 , it is postulated that preferred hand of right-handers would show stronger hemispheric asymmetry in cutaneous perception without any task-relevant conditions.…”