Structural hemispheric asymmetries underlie verbal Stroop performance

6533b836fe1ef96bd12a09d6

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Structural hemispheric asymmetries underlie verbal Stroop performance

Ilaria Mazzonetto Antonino Vallesi Laura Babcock Vincenza Tarantino Carlo Semenza Alessandra Bertoldo Sandra Arbula Mariagrazia Capizzi Ettore Ambrosini

subject

Adult Male FreeSurfer Surface area Prefrontal Cortex Context (language use)Grey matter behavioral disciplines and activities 050105 experimental psychology Task (project management)Verbal Stroop Correlation Young Adult 03 medical and health sciences Behavioral Neuroscience FreeSurfer; Hemispheric asymmetry; Spatial Stroop; Surface area; Verbal Stroop; Visual word form area; Behavioral Neuroscience Cognition 0302 clinical medicine Image Processing Computer-Assisted medicine Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Visual word form area Gray Matter Dominance Cerebral Cerebral Cortex Brain Mapping Settore M-PSI/02 - Psicobiologia E Psicologia Fisiologica 05 social sciences Spatial Stroop Brain Cognition Healthy Volunteer Magnetic Resonance Imaging Healthy Volunteers medicine.anatomical_structure Visual word form area Stroop Test Laterality Hemispheric asymmetry Female Psychology 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Human Stroop effect Cognitive psychology

description

Performance on tasks involving cognitive control such as the Stroop task is often associated with left lateralized brain activations. Based on this neuro-functional evidence, we tested whether leftward structural grey matter asymmetries would also predict inter-individual differences in combatting Stroop interference. To check for the specificity of the results, both a verbal Stroop task and a spatial one were administered to a total of 111 healthy young individuals, for whom T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images were also acquired. Surface thickness and area estimations were calculated using FreeSurfer. Participants' hemispheres were registered to a symmetric template and Laterality Indices (LI) for the surface thickness and for the area at each vertex in each participant were computed. The correlation of these surface LI measures with the verbal and spatial Stroop effects (incongruent-congruent difference in trial performance) was assessed at each vertex by means of general linear models at the whole-brain level. We found a significant correlation between performance and surface area LI in an inferior posterior temporal cluster (overlapping with the so-called visual word form area, VWFA), with a more left-lateralized area in this region associated with a smaller Stroop effect only in the verbal task. These results point to an involvement of the VWFA for higher-level processes based on word reading, including the suppression of this process when required by the task, and could be interpreted in the context of cross-hemispheric rivalry.

year	journal	country	edition	language
2017-01-01	Behavioural Brain Research

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2017.08.024