Abstract
Evolutionary adaptations of temporo-parietal cortex are considered to be a critical specialization of the human brain. Cortical adaptations, however, can affect different aspects of brain architecture, including local expansion of the cortical sheet or changes in connectivity between cortical areas. We distinguish different types of changes in brain architecture using a computational neuroanatomy approach. We investigate the extent to which between-species alignment, based on cortical myelin, can predict changes in connectivity patterns across macaque, chimpanzee, and human. We show that expansion and relocation of brain areas can predict terminations of several white matter tracts in temporo-parietal cortex, including the middle and superior longitudinal fasciculus, but not the arcuate fasciculus. This demonstrates that the arcuate fasciculus underwent additional evolutionary modifications affecting the temporal lobe connectivity pattern. This approach can flexibly be extended to include other features of cortical organization and other species, allowing direct tests of comparative hypotheses of brain organization.
Highlights
The temporal lobe is a morphological adaptation of the brain that is unique to primates (Bryant and Preuss, 2018)
We set out to investigate different types of cortical reorganization affecting the temporal lobe across macaque, chimpanzee, and human brains
We developed a cross-species surface registration method based on cortical myelin content, which gives us an index of how cortical areas have relocated during evolution
Summary
The temporal lobe is a morphological adaptation of the brain that is unique to primates (Bryant and Preuss, 2018). Its origins likely include expansion of higher-order visual areas to accompany the primate reliance on vision (Allman, 1982). Temporal association cortex contains areas devoted to higher-level visual processing and social information processing (Rushworth et al, 2013; Sallet et al, 2011) that, in turn, rely strongly on visual information in primates (Perrett et al, 1992). The expanded temporal cortex in apes and humans contains several multimodal areas and areas associated with semantics and language
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