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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on November 4, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp234
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Cerebral Lateralization of Face-Selective and Body-Selective Visual Areas Depends on Handedness

Roel M. Willems1,2, Marius V. Peelen3 and Peter Hagoort1,4

1 Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9101, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 2 Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA, 3 Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA, 4 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Address correspondence to Roel M. Willems, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, 132 Barker Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-3190, USA. Email: roelwillems{at}berkeley.edu.

The left-hemisphere dominance for language is a core example of the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres. The degree of left-hemisphere dominance for language depends on hand preference: Whereas the majority of right-handers show left-hemispheric language lateralization, this number is reduced in left-handers. Here, we assessed whether handedness analogously has an influence upon lateralization in the visual system. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we localized 4 more or less specialized extrastriate areas in left- and right-handers, namely fusiform face area (FFA), extrastriate body area (EBA), fusiform body area (FBA), and human motion area (human middle temporal [hMT]). We found that lateralization of FFA and EBA depends on handedness: These areas were right lateralized in right-handers but not in left-handers. A similar tendency was observed in FBA but not in hMT. We conclude that the relationship between handedness and hemispheric lateralization extends to functionally lateralized parts of visual cortex, indicating a general coupling between cerebral lateralization and handedness. Our findings indicate that hemispheric specialization is not fixed but can vary considerably across individuals even in areas engaged relatively early in the visual system.

Key Words: bodies • faces • fMRI, handedness • visual


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