Brain News
A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences explored the differences between male and female handwriting and language skills. The study is published in the journal Human Brain Mapping.
The Study
The researchers recruited 53 healthy adults, aged 19–28 years, who undertook a series of reading, cognitive, and visual‐motor tests. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to record their brain activity during the tests.
Factors like reading accuracy and fluency, sustained attention, verbal working memory, visual‐motor skill, etc. were assessed.
The Findings
The results revealed the neural basis of sex differences in handwriting and language skills. Brains of men and women differ in the functional connectivity between Exner’s area and the cerebellum.
This, in turn, influences the differences between the two genders’ orthographic working memory, oral spelling, language fluency, reading and writing accuracy, etc.
The researchers are enthusiastic that the findings of the study can help formulate effective interventions for handwriting-related disorders like dysgraphia, dyslexia, etc.
They remarked: “Males and females were shown to have different utilization of a writing‐specific brain region, namely Exner’s area, and this has a plausible link to behavioral sex differences in handwriting. The work has methodological implications for neuroimaging studies of handwriting in normal [people] and patients [of written expression disorder]”.
To Know More You May Refer To
Yang, Y., Tam, F., Graham, S. J., Sun, G., Li, J., Gu, C., Tao, R., Wang, N., Bi, H. Y., & Zuo, Z. (2020). Men and women differ in the neural basis of handwriting. Human brain mapping, 41(10), 2642–2655. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.24968
