What Underlies a Greater Reversal in Tactile Temporal Order Judgment When the Hands Are Crossed? A Structural MRI Study

Our subjective temporal order of two successive tactile stimuli, delivered one to each hand, is often inverted when our hands are crossed. However, there is great variability among different individuals. We addressed the question of why some show almost complete reversal, but others show little reversal. To this end, we obtained structural magnetic resonance imaging data from 42 participants who also participated in the tactile temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. We extracted the cortical thickness and the convoluted surface area as cortical characteristics in 68 regions. We found that the participants with a thinner, larger, and more convoluted cerebral cortex in 10 regions, including the right pars-orbitalis, right and left postcentral gyri, left precuneus, left superior parietal lobule, right middle temporal gyrus, left superior temporal gyrus, right cuneus, left supramarginal gyrus, and right rostral middle frontal gyrus, showed a smaller degree of judgment reversal. In light of major theoretical accounts, we suggest that cortical elaboration in the aforementioned regions improve the crossed-hand TOJ performance through better integration of the tactile stimuli with the correct spatial representations in the left parietal regions, better representation of spatial information in the postcentral gyrus, or improvement of top-down inhibitory control by the right pars-orbitalis.