Task setup (experiments 1 and 2). For each trial, subjects had to judge whether a visually presented drawing showed a left or right hand. The top panel illustrates two representative stimuli, one for each hand laterality. Crucially, for each trial we considered whether the previous stimulus had the same or a different laterality than the currently displayed hand drawing. Accordingly, we analyzed the effect of factors hand (2 levels: left or right) and hand-order (2 levels: repeat or switch) on reaction times and cerebral activity. The intertrial interval (ITI) between the offset of one trial (i.e., the response) and the onset of the next (i.e., the presentation of the stimulus) randomly varied between 1.5 and 2.5 s, creating a pseudorandom jitter between successive trials.