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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on September 16, 2008
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn168
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Gesture Subtype–Dependent Left Lateralization of Praxis Planning: An Event-Related fMRI Study

S. Bohlhalter, N. Hattori, L. Wheaton, E. Fridman, E. A. Shamim, G. Garraux and M. Hallett

Human Motor Control Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA

Address correspondence to M. Hallett, Human Motor Control Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, NIH, Building 10, Room 5N226, 10 Center Drive, MSC-1430, Bethesda, MD 20892-1428, USA. Email: hallettm{at}ninds.nih.gov.

Ideomotor apraxia is a disorder mainly of praxis planning, and the deficit is typically more evident in pantomiming transitive (tool related) than intransitive (communicative) gestures. The goal of the present study was to assess differential hemispheric lateralization of praxis production using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging. Voxel-based analysis demonstrated significant activations in posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and premotor cortex (PMC) association areas, which were predominantly left hemispheric, regardless of whether planning occurred for right or left hand transitive or intransitive pantomimes. Furthermore, region of interest–based calculation of mean laterality index (LI) revealed a significantly stronger left lateralization in PPC/PMC clusters for planning intransitive (LI = –0.49 + 0.10, mean + standard deviation [SD]) than transitive gestures (–0.37 + 0.08, P = 0.02, paired t-tests) irrespective of the hand involved. This differential left lateralization for planning remained significant in PMC (LI = –0.47 + 0.14 and –0.36 + 0.13, mean + SD, P = 0.04), but not in PPC (–0.56 + 0.11 and –0.45 + 0.12, P = 0.11), when both regions were analyzed separately. In conclusion, the findings point to a left-hemispheric specialization for praxis planning, being more pronounced for intransitive gestures in PMC, possibly due to their communicative nature.

Key Words: intransitive • left lateralization • praxis planning • transitive


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