Performance on unimanual and bimanual tapping tasks by patients with lesions of the frontal or temporal lobe

The performance of 151 patients with unilateral excisions from either the frontal or the temporal cortex and 60 normal subjects was examined on three motor tasks: (1) simple unimanual tapping; (2) spatially ordered unimanual tapping; and (3) bimanual tapping in which the movements of the two hands were out-of-phase. All patient groups were impaired with both hands on spatially ordered unimanual tapping. In contrast, only those patients with either left or right frontal-lobe lesions performed poorly on the bimanual tapping task. Our findings demonstrate that the frontal cortex plays a critical role in the co-ordination of arm and hand movements, particularly when different movements have to be performed simultaneously.