Right parietal-prefrontal lateralization during somatosensory discrimination of shape

Introduction: Somatosensory discrimination (SSD) of shape by manual exploration engages extended fronto-parietal networks whose activity and hemispheric topography are task-dependend and reflects different stages of somatosensory processing. During SSD with the right hand (RH), the right dorsal intraparietal sulcus (dIPS) is active during explicit discrimination of object shape, whereas the left dIPS is involved in shape information maintenance. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test the hypothesis that explicit SSD with the left hand (LH) shows the same asymmetric involvement of parietal a…