Quantitative assessment of prefrontal cortex in humans relative to nonhuman primates

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Chad J. Donahue, Washington University; Matthew F. Glasser, Washington University; Todd M Preuss, Emory University; James K Rilling, Emory University; David C. Van Essen, Washington University
• Language: English
• Date: 2018-05-29
• Publisher: National Academy of Sciences
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © 2018 The Author(s).
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1721653115
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• ISSN: 0027-8424
• Volume: 115
• Issue: 22
• Start Page: E5183
• End Page: E5192
• Grant/Funding Information: Macaque and chimpanzee datasets were provided through support from NIH Grant P01AG026423, National Center for Research Resources Grant P51RR165 (superseded by the Office of Research Infrastructure Programs/OD P51OD11132), and National Chimpanzee Brain Resource Grant R24NS092988.; Human datasets were provided by the Human Connectome Project, Washington University-University of Minnesota Consortium U54MH091657 (principal investigators: D.C.V.E. and Kamil Ugurbil), funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University.; This work was supported by NIH Grants T32EB014855 (to C.J.D.), F30MH097312 (to M.F.G.), and R01MH60974 (to D.C.V.E.).
• Research Categories: Psychology, Behavioral; Biology, Neuroscience

Abstract

Humans have the largest cerebral cortex among primates. The question of whether association cortex, particularly prefrontal cortex (PFC), is disproportionately larger in humans compared with nonhuman primates is controversial: Some studies report that human PFC is relatively larger, whereas others report a more uniform PFC scaling. We address this controversy using MRI-derived cortical surfaces of many individual humans, chimpanzees, and macaques. We present two parcellation-based PFC delineations based on cytoarchitecture and function and show that a previously used morphological surrogate (cortex anterior to the genu of the corpus callosum) substantially underestimates PFC extent, especially in humans. We find that the proportion of cortical gray matter occupied by PFC in humans is up to 1.9-fold greater than in macaques and 1.2-fold greater than in chimpanzees. The disparity is even more prominent for the proportion of subcortical white matter underlying the PFC, which is 2.4-fold greater in humans than in macaques and 1.7-fold greater than in chimpanzees.