Visual spatial processing and its relation to the corpus callosum

Abstract

Summary, The relationship between anatomical sizes of different regions of the corpus callosum and functional visuospatial skills was investigated in 24 fight-handed students (12 males and 12 females) using midsagittal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Men had significantly larger absolut ca[losal areas and in some cases wider callosal measurements than women but there were no sex differences in relative sizes of the corpus callosum compared to the total brain. The results showed a tendency toward male superiority in solving visuospatial tasks, some subtests even reached a high significance favoring males. Both sexes showed a strong negative correlation between the size of the corpus callosum and enhanced visuospatial skills. These findings indicate that the corpus callosum plays a minor role in interhemispheric communication of higher order cognitive processing.

Verbal performances and their relation to the corpus callosum depending on gender

“…This means that men and women possess the same retative corpus callosum size, a result which was expected, as this had been confirmed in other studies [1,27,40,41,45,49]. The verbal performances did not indicate the previously described female superiority in any forro (see also more recent studies, e. g. [38]), as it was not even possible to obtain tendential female higher performances, in comparison to men (cf.…”

“…No significant sexual differences were found in the absolute sizes of the body and the splenium (see [45]). …”

“…Handedness was also a decisive factor in some of these studies [9,13,18,48,49]. However, no difference was determined in a large number of investigations, or the difference disappeared when the callosal areas were related to the total brain [49,1,40,45]. Moreover, some still disagree as to whether the callosum has a more excitatory [1, 12, t5, 24, 29, 48], oran inhibitory [8,10,32] function on interhemispheric cognitive processes.…”

“…In the study carried out by Unterrainer et al [45], a negative correlation using the same subject group could be determined between relative callosum sizes and visuo-spatial performances in both sexes. These results were interpreted as an increased lateralization in higher visuo-spatial performances and were then analyzed with the subjects' verbal performances in view of anatomical size.…”

Lateralized Cognitive Visuospatial Processing: Is It Primarily Gender-Related or Due to Quality of Performance?

“…ondly, the decision to employ this particular procedure was related to a previous study by Unterrainer et al [45], in which gender differences were found using this test.…”