Abstract
To investigate the neural substrate of typewriting Japanese words and to detect the difference between the neural substrate of typewriting and handwriting, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in 16 healthy volunteers. All subjects were skillful touch typists and performed five tasks: a typing task, a writing task, a reading task, and two control tasks. Three brain regions were activated during both the typing and the writing tasks: the left superior parietal lobule, the left supramarginal gyrus, and the left premotor cortex close to Exner’s area. Although typing and writing involved common brain regions, direct comparison between the typing and the writing task revealed greater left posteromedial intraparietal cortex activation in the typing task. In addition, activity in the left premotor cortex was more rostral in the typing task than in the writing task. These findings suggest that, although the brain circuits involved in Japanese typewriting are almost the same as those involved in handwriting, there are brain regions that are specific for typewriting.
Highlights
Use of a personal computer is common in everyday life and, typing on a keyboard has become common for many people as a replacement for writing on paper
We report the results obtained at p < 0.05, voxel-wise corrected for multiple comparisons using the family-wise error correction for the whole brain with a spatial extent larger than 30 voxels and cluster-level corrected at p < 0.05
The total number of keys pressed during the typing task was 278.1 (SD = 7.20), the difference between the right hand and the left hand usage (i.e.; the number of keys pressed by the right hand minus the number pressed by the left hand) was -4.75 (SD = 5.09), and the accuracy of typing was 96.34% (SD = 4.83%), indicating that all subjects achieved the typing tasks almost perfectly using both hands
Summary
Use of a personal computer is common in everyday life and, typing on a keyboard has become common for many people as a replacement for writing on paper. Stroke patients with isolated typing impairment without aphasia, apraxia, or visuospatial impairment and with relative preservation of writing ability have been reported, and this phenomenon has been termed dystypia [1]. Ryu et al reported a 64-year-old right-handed man with acute infarcts in the bilateral border-zone regions, predominantly the left frontal subcortical area, who developed a sudden typing disturbance without aphasia or neglect [2]. Cooks et al reported a 68-year-old patient with Parkinson’s disease who had a stroke in the left temporoparietal cortex and exhibited disproportionately affected typing relative to handwriting [3].
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