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High-expanding cortical regions in human development and evolution are related to higher intellectual abilities
- Source :
- Cerebral Cortex
- Publication Year :
- 2013
-
Abstract
- Cortical surface area has tremendously expanded during human evolution, and similar patterns of cortical expansion have been observed during childhood development. An intriguing hypothesis is that the high-expanding cortical regions also show the strongest correlations with intellectual function in humans. However, we do not know how the regional distribution of correlations between intellectual function and cortical area maps onto expansion in development and evolution. Here, in a sample of 1048 participants, we show that regions in which cortical area correlates with visuospatial reasoning abilities are generally high expanding in both development and evolution. Several regions in the frontal cortex, especially the anterior cingulate, showed high expansion in both development and evolution. The area of these regions was related to intellectual functions in humans. Low-expanding areas were not related to cognitive scores. These findings suggest that cortical regions involved in higher intellectual functions have expanded the most during development and evolution. The radial unit hypothesis provides a common framework for interpretation of the findings in the context of evolution and prenatal development, while additional cellular mechanisms, such as synaptogenesis, gliogenesis, dendritic arborization, and intracortical myelination, likely impact area expansion in later childhood. This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Cerebral Cortex following peer review. The version of record [insert complete citation information here] is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bht201
- Subjects :
- Adult
Male
Intellectual functions
Adolescent
Cognitive Neuroscience
Intelligence
Synaptogenesis
Context (language use)
03 medical and health sciences
Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Young Adult
0302 clinical medicine
Cognition
medicine
Animals
Humans
Child
030304 developmental biology
Aged
Cerebral Cortex
0303 health sciences
Middle Aged
Child development
Biological Evolution
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
medicine.anatomical_structure
Frontal lobe
Human evolution
Cerebral cortex
Macaca
Female
Psychology
Neuroscience
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Cognitive psychology
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14602199 and 10473211
- Volume :
- 25
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....b53ca64eb8377962273c0da1de45ce59