Investigating the neural architecture of handedness

2015-02-11

The question, what constitutes the neural correlates of handedness has never been answeres unequivocally. In a recent paper by Guadalupe et al. (2014) (link to the original article) the authors investigated an impressively large sample of 1960 right-handed and 106 left-handed participants to answer this question. The authors compared left- and right-handers regarding the cortical surface area of 10 different candidate regions related to language, motor control and visual processing which were obtained from previous studies investigating the structural correlates of handedness in the brain. While the authors found a nominally significant association between handedness and the surface area of the left precentral sulcus, not a single effect survived statistical correction for multiple testing. Frontiers in Psychology invited a team of lateralization experts from the Biopsychology lab to comment on this important discovery in a prestigious Frontiers Commentary Article.

Ocklenburg, S., Garland, A., Ströckens, F., Uber Reinert, A., Investigating the neural architecture of handedness. Front. Psychol. 6:148. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00148.