Hence, the attention-free, single finger-tapping blocks of the main experiments were used to map the hand areas for these subjects. MRI data acquisition MRI data were acquired with a 3.0 Tesla MRI system (Allegra, Siemens, Erlangen, Germany) at the Brain Imaging Center in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Functional images Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical were obtained by using a T*-weighted transversal gradient-echo echo-planar image (EPI) sequence (repetition time 2000 msec, echo time 30 msec, flip angle 77°, 36 slices, slice thickness 3 mm, matrix 192 × 192 mm, gap 10%, in plane resolution 3.0 × 3.0 mm). In

sum, 32 (4 × 8) fMRI volumes were collected per condition and subject. Three-dimensional high-resolution structural images were acquired using a T1-weighted

sagittal gradient-echo (MP-RAGE) sequence (TR 2250 msec, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical TE 4.38 msec, flip angel 8°, inversion time T1 900 msec, 160 slices, slice thickness 1 mm, matrix 256 × 256 mm, gap 50%, in plane resolution 1.0 × 1.0 mm). Data analysis Preprocessing fMRI data Functional MRI data were preprocessed with Brainvoyager QX 1.7 (BrainInnovation, Maastricht, the Netherlands) software. Preprocessing involved slice scan time correction (sinc interpolation), Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical 3D motion correction (trilinear interpolation), and temporal filtering (linear trend removal, high-pass filter three cycles in time course). The first five volumes of each functional run were discarded because of unsteady magnetization. All volumes were aligned to the first picture of each run, coregistered with the anatomical Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical data, and transformed to

the Talairach coordinate space (Talairach and Tournoux 1988). ROI analysis As especially in the primary sensorimotor Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical cortices intersubject anatomical variability is high (Woods 1996; White et al. 1997a; Rademacher et al. 2001), we chose a combined functional and anatomical approach to define our ROIs. Despite this intersubject anatomical variability, there is no hint for a handedness-specific effect on brain anatomy in the primary sensorimotor cortex (White et al. 1997b; Good et al. 2001). The central sulcus and the characteristic Calpain hand knob (Yousry et al. 1997) were used in all subjects for anatomical identification of the hand area of each subject separately. Then, for each subject, a whole-brain analysis of the localizer data with the significance selleck threshold set to q(FDR) = 0.05 was performed in order to identify the functional relevant voxels on the individual level. Left hemisphere hand areas were assigned with the one-hand right finger movement against rest, and right hemisphere hand areas were assigned with one-hand left finger movement against rest. As it is known that there are at least two distinct hand representations within the primary motor cortex (Geyer et al.