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Functional MRI of Handwriting Tasks: A Study of Healthy Young Adults Interacting with a Novel Touch-Sensitive Tablet

Handwriting is a complex human activity that engages a blend of cognitive and visual motor skills. Current understanding of the neural correlates of handwriting has largely come from lesion studies of patients with impaired handwriting. Task-based fMRI studies would be useful to supplement this work...

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Autores principales: Karimpoor, Mahta, Churchill, Nathan W., Tam, Fred, Fischer, Corinne E., Schweizer, Tom A., Graham, Simon J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5816817/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29487511
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00030
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author Karimpoor, Mahta
Churchill, Nathan W.
Tam, Fred
Fischer, Corinne E.
Schweizer, Tom A.
Graham, Simon J.
author_facet Karimpoor, Mahta
Churchill, Nathan W.
Tam, Fred
Fischer, Corinne E.
Schweizer, Tom A.
Graham, Simon J.
author_sort Karimpoor, Mahta
collection PubMed
description Handwriting is a complex human activity that engages a blend of cognitive and visual motor skills. Current understanding of the neural correlates of handwriting has largely come from lesion studies of patients with impaired handwriting. Task-based fMRI studies would be useful to supplement this work. To address concerns over ecological validity, previously we developed a fMRI-compatible, computerized tablet system for writing and drawing including visual feedback of hand position and an augmented reality display. The purpose of the present work is to use the tablet system in proof-of-concept to characterize brain activity associated with clinically relevant handwriting tasks, originally developed to characterize handwriting impairments in Alzheimer’s disease patients. As a prelude to undertaking fMRI studies of patients, imaging was performed of twelve young healthy subjects who copied sentences, phone numbers, and grocery lists using the fMRI-compatible tablet. Activation maps for all handwriting tasks consisted of a distributed network of regions in reasonable agreement with previous studies of handwriting performance. In addition, differences in brain activity were observed between the test subcomponents consistent with different demands of neural processing for successful task performance, as identified by investigating three quantitative behavioral metrics (writing speed, stylus contact force and stylus in air time). This study provides baseline behavioral and brain activity results for fMRI studies that adopt this handwriting test to characterize patients with brain impairments.
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spelling pubmed-58168172018-02-27 Functional MRI of Handwriting Tasks: A Study of Healthy Young Adults Interacting with a Novel Touch-Sensitive Tablet Karimpoor, Mahta Churchill, Nathan W. Tam, Fred Fischer, Corinne E. Schweizer, Tom A. Graham, Simon J. Front Hum Neurosci Neuroscience Handwriting is a complex human activity that engages a blend of cognitive and visual motor skills. Current understanding of the neural correlates of handwriting has largely come from lesion studies of patients with impaired handwriting. Task-based fMRI studies would be useful to supplement this work. To address concerns over ecological validity, previously we developed a fMRI-compatible, computerized tablet system for writing and drawing including visual feedback of hand position and an augmented reality display. The purpose of the present work is to use the tablet system in proof-of-concept to characterize brain activity associated with clinically relevant handwriting tasks, originally developed to characterize handwriting impairments in Alzheimer’s disease patients. As a prelude to undertaking fMRI studies of patients, imaging was performed of twelve young healthy subjects who copied sentences, phone numbers, and grocery lists using the fMRI-compatible tablet. Activation maps for all handwriting tasks consisted of a distributed network of regions in reasonable agreement with previous studies of handwriting performance. In addition, differences in brain activity were observed between the test subcomponents consistent with different demands of neural processing for successful task performance, as identified by investigating three quantitative behavioral metrics (writing speed, stylus contact force and stylus in air time). This study provides baseline behavioral and brain activity results for fMRI studies that adopt this handwriting test to characterize patients with brain impairments. Frontiers Media S.A. 2018-02-13 /pmc/articles/PMC5816817/ /pubmed/29487511 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00030 Text en Copyright © 2018 Karimpoor, Churchill, Tam, Fischer, Schweizer and Graham. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Neuroscience
Karimpoor, Mahta
Churchill, Nathan W.
Tam, Fred
Fischer, Corinne E.
Schweizer, Tom A.
Graham, Simon J.
Functional MRI of Handwriting Tasks: A Study of Healthy Young Adults Interacting with a Novel Touch-Sensitive Tablet
title Functional MRI of Handwriting Tasks: A Study of Healthy Young Adults Interacting with a Novel Touch-Sensitive Tablet
title_full Functional MRI of Handwriting Tasks: A Study of Healthy Young Adults Interacting with a Novel Touch-Sensitive Tablet
title_fullStr Functional MRI of Handwriting Tasks: A Study of Healthy Young Adults Interacting with a Novel Touch-Sensitive Tablet
title_full_unstemmed Functional MRI of Handwriting Tasks: A Study of Healthy Young Adults Interacting with a Novel Touch-Sensitive Tablet
title_short Functional MRI of Handwriting Tasks: A Study of Healthy Young Adults Interacting with a Novel Touch-Sensitive Tablet
title_sort functional mri of handwriting tasks: a study of healthy young adults interacting with a novel touch-sensitive tablet
topic Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5816817/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29487511
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00030
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