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Open Imaging Index
MRI Brain

Handedness and symbolic number fMRI (ds001838)

Handedness and Symbolic Number Representation

Brain MRI and task fMRI of right-handed and left-handed young adults passively viewing Arabic digits, collected to test whether the hand used for writing shapes how the brain lateralizes symbolic number processing.

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Overview

This dataset contains the MRI data behind a registered report by Celia Goffin, H. Moriah Sokolowski, Michael Slipenkyj and Daniel Ansari on whether writing hand relates to where the brain processes number symbols. Right-handed and left-handed adults watched a stream of Arabic digits in an fMRI adaptation design: one digit repeated, and now and then a different digit appeared. The paper reports the known left-lateralized effect in the intraparietal sulcus for right-handers, weak signs of the reverse pattern in left-handers, and no significant difference between the groups. The data were released on OpenNeuro in April 2019; snapshot 1.0.1 added the DOI.

Composition

The snapshot holds 53 subjects aged 18 to 35 (26 female, 27 male), one of whom has no recorded age. By the group column of participants.tsv, 25 are right-handed (IDs 1 to 27) and 28 are left-handed (IDs 101 to 128). The participants file also records handedness from the Edinburgh inventory and from a performance measure, eligibility on a neurological questionnaire, and which runs and subjects entered the published analyses. Each subject has a single session with one T1-weighted scan and four functional runs, except sub-12, which has three.

Acquisition

All scans come from one Siemens Prisma fit at 3 T at the Robarts Research Institute in London, Ontario, with a 32-channel head coil. The T1-weighted scan is a sagittal 3D MP-RAGE (TR 2.3 s, TE 2.98 ms, TI 0.9 s, flip angle 9 degrees, 1 mm slices). The functional runs use a multiband echo-planar BOLD sequence (multiband factor 4, TR 1 s, TE 30 ms, flip angle 40 degrees, 2.5 mm slices).

Annotations

There are no image annotations. Events files give the onset, duration and condition of each trial (deviant digit, catch or null trial); three subjects have no events files.

Known limitations

  • participants.tsv lists 55 participants, but sub-3 and sub-6 have no imaging data in the release.
  • Three released subjects were excluded from the published analyses, and some runs of included subjects were dropped; the reasons are not given in the dataset.
  • One subject in the left-handed group is right-handed by the Edinburgh inventory.
  • The dataset has no README, and the "CCO" license string in dataset_description.json is read as CC0.

Cohort

Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 53 subjects.

Sex

  • Female 26 49%
  • Male 27 51%

sex in participants.tsv of ds001838 snapshot 1.0.1 (CC0), counted per row for the 53 released subjects

Contrast / sequence

Groups can overlap

  • T1-weighted 53 100%
  • BOLD fMRI 53 100%

anat/*_T1w.nii.gz, func/*_bold.nii.gz in File tree of ds001838 snapshot 1.0.1 (CC0), NIfTI files counted per subject and BIDS suffix

Scanner vendor

  • Siemens Healthineers 53 100%

T1w.json and task-Adaptation_bold.json in OpenNeuro ds001838 snapshot 1.0.1 (dataset_description.json, participants.json, CHANGES, sidecars and snapshot summary)

Country

  • Canada 53 100%

task-Adaptation_bold.json in OpenNeuro ds001838 snapshot 1.0.1 (dataset_description.json, participants.json, CHANGES, sidecars and snapshot summary)

Age

mean 24.3 ± 4.2, median 23, range 18 to 35

0
10
20
30
39
10-1920-2930-39

age in participants.tsv of ds001838 snapshot 1.0.1 (CC0), counted per row for the 53 released subjects

Condition

Groups can overlap

  • Healthy control 51 96%

NeurologicalQuestionnaire_Eligibility in participants.tsv of ds001838 snapshot 1.0.1 (CC0), counted per row for the 53 released subjects

Field strength

  • 3 T 53 100%

T1w.json and task-Adaptation_bold.json in OpenNeuro ds001838 snapshot 1.0.1 (dataset_description.json, participants.json, CHANGES, sidecars and snapshot summary)

Age by sex

Reported cross table. Missing cells were not published (fewer than 10 or not reported).

Female Male
  • 22
    20-29
    17

sex and age in participants.tsv of ds001838 snapshot 1.0.1 (CC0), counted per row for the 53 released subjects

Contrast combinations

How many subjects have exactly each set of contrasts.

T1wboldSubjects with exactly this set
53

sub-*/ in File tree of ds001838 snapshot 1.0.1 (CC0), NIfTI files counted per subject and BIDS suffix

License and access

Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer

Access
Open download

Download without an account

Access page

Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal

Public domain dedication. Do anything with the data, including commercial use, without asking and without having to give credit.

dataset_description.json of snapshot 1.0.1 states "License" as "CCO", read as CC0.

Original license text Version read: 1.0 Checked 2026-10-07

What you can do

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you can share

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you must do

  • No
  • Share alike No
  • No
  • No
  • Manuscript review No
  • Release code No
  • Return results No
  • Delete after use No

Limits

  • No
  • Location limits No

Citation

Goffin C, Sokolowski HM, Slipenkyj M, Ansari D. Does writing handedness affect neural representation of symbolic number? An fMRI adaptation study. Cortex 121, 27-43 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2019.07.017

Sources

Every number on this page comes from one of these documents. Each chart names the table or page it is taken from. The raw numbers are in stats.csv.