What type of inhibition underpins performance on Luria’s Fist-Edge-Palm task?

ABSTRACT

Objective

The Fist-Edge-Palm task is a motor sequencing task believed to be sensitive to frontal lobe impairment. The present study aimed to investigate the inhibitory processes underlying successful execution of this task.

Method

Seventy-two healthy participants were asked to perform the Fist-Edge-Palm task paced at 120 bpms, 60 bpms and self-paced. They also completed assessments sensitive to recently dissociated forms of inhibition (the Hayling Sentence Completion Test and the Stroop Color-Word Test) that have recently been shown to be differentially lateralized (the right and left Prefrontal Cortex, respectively), and Cattell’s Culture Fair Intelligence test.

Results

Analysis revealed that performance on the Hayling Sentence Completion Test predicted the amount of crude errors and the overall score on the Fist-Edge-Palm task, and that pacing condition had no effect on this outcome. Neither the Stroop Color-Word Test nor Cattell’s Culture Fair Intelligence Test predicted performance on the Fist-Edge-Palm task.

Conclusions

Consistent with some previous neuroimaging findings, the present findings suggest that Fist-Edge-Palm task performance relies on right lateralized inhibitory processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Luria test
• Fist-Edge-Palm
• executive function
• prefrontal cortex
• motor sequencing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in https://osf.io/xs7wz/.

Public significance statement

Luria’s Fist-Edge-Palm task is a well-known neuropsychological assessment employed to assess frontal lobe and psycho-motor functioning, and to detect voluntary movement disorders, but the inhibitory processes underpinning performance are not well understood. This study provides evidence indicating that right, but not left, prefrontal cortex inhibition functions underpin successful performance on Luria’s task. These findings increase the clinical utility of this much-used task.