Hemispheric lateralization of event-related brain potentials in different processing phases during unimanual finger movements

Previous functional MRI and brain electrophysiology studies have studied the left-right differences during the tapping tasks and found that the activation of left hemisphere was more significant than that of right hemisphere. In this study, we wanted to delineate this lateralization phenomenon not only in the execution phase but also in other processing phases, such as early visual, pre-executive and post-executive phases. We have designed a finger-tapping task to delineate the left-right differences of event related potentials (ERPs) to right finger movement in sixteen right handed college students. The mean amplitudes of ERPs were analyzed to examine the left-right dominance of cortical activity in the phase of early visual process (75-120ms), pre-execution (175-260ms), execution (310-420ms) and post-execution (420-620ms). In the execution phase, ERPs at the left electrodes were significantly more pronounced than those at the right electrodes (F3 > F4, C3 > C4, P3 > P4, O1 > 02) under the situation without comparing the central electrodes (Fz, Cz, Pz, and Oz). No difference was found between left and right electrodes in other three phases except the C3 electrode still showed more dominant than C4 in the pre- and post-execution phase. In conclusion, the phenomenon of brain lateralization occur major in the execution phase. The central area also showed the lateralization in the pre- and post-execution to demonstrate its unique lateralized contributions to unilateral simple finger movements.