The Journal of Neurophysiology Vol. 88 No. 2 August 2002, pp. 1051-1058
Copyright ©2002 by the American Physiological Society

RAPID COMMUNICATION

Interhemispheric Transmission of Visuomotor Information in Humans: fMRI Evidence

 ¹Istituto Di Ricovero E Cura A Carattere Scientifico San Raffaele Hospital, 20132 Milan, Italy;  ²University of Milan Bicocca, 20126 Milan, Italy;  ³Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London WC1 3AR, United Kingdom;  ⁴Istituto Di Neuroscienze Bioimmagini-Consiglio Nazionale della Richerche, 20090 Milan, Italy;  ⁵University Vita-Salute, Milan, Italy; and  ⁶Department of Neurological and Visual Sciences, University of Verona, 37134 Verona, Italy

Tettamanti, M., E. Paulesu, P. Scifo, A. Maravita, F. Fazio, D. Perani, and C. A. Marzi. Interhemispheric Transmission of Visuomotor Information in Humans: fMRI Evidence. J. Neurophysiol. 88: 1051-1058, 2002. Normal human subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing a simple visual manual reaction-time (RT) task with lateralized brief stimuli, the so-called Poffenberger's paradigm. This paradigm was employed to measure interhemispheric transmission (IT) time by subtracting mean RT for the uncrossed hemifield-hand conditions, that is, those conditions not requiring an IT, from the crossed hemifield-hand conditions, that is, those conditions requiring an IT to relay visual information from the hemisphere of entry to the hemisphere subserving the response. The obtained difference is widely believed to reflect callosal conduction time, but so far there is no direct physiological evidence in humans. The aim of our experiment was twofold: first, to test the hypothesis that IT of visuomotor information requires the corpus callosum and to identify the cortical areas specifically activated during IT. Second, we sought to discover whether IT occurs mainly at premotor or perceptual stages of information processing. We found significant activations in a number of frontal, parietal, and temporal cortical areas and in the genu of the corpus callosum. These activations were present only in the crossed conditions and therefore were specifically related to IT. No selective activation was present in the uncrossed conditions. The location of the activated callosal and cortical areas suggests that IT occurs mainly, but not exclusively, at premotor level. These results provide clear cut evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the crossed-uncrossed difference in the Poffenberger paradigm depends on IT rather than on a differential hemispheric activation.