Hemispheric asymmetries in motor function: I. Left-hemisphere specialization for memory but not performance.
Patients with unilateral brain lesions of vascular origin were administered tests designed to determine if left-hemisphere specialization in manual-sequence tasks involves memory for these sequences, or performance of them, or both. Patients with left-sided lesions were worse than patients with right-sided lesions on two tasks requiring the recall of hand positions. Whereas patients with left-sided lesions showed a trend towards being worse on speeded performance of an already learned manual sequence, in both groups on this task there were a large number of failures to remember the sequence. When memory demands were better controlled by providing a model during the speeded performance task, there were no group differences. It is proposed that there is left-hemisphere specialization for memory but not performance of such motor tasks.
D001921:Brain / Q000503:physiopathology; D002561:Cerebrovascular Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006225:Hand / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*