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Prefrontal white matter volume is disproportionately larger in humans than in other primates

Nature Neuroscience volume 8, pages 242–252 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

Determining how the human brain differs from nonhuman primate brains is central to understanding human behavioral evolution. There is currently dispute over whether the prefrontal cortex, which mediates evolutionarily interesting behaviors, has increased disproportionately. Using magnetic resonance imaging brain scans from 11 primate species, we measured gray, white and total volumes for both prefrontal and the entire cerebrum on each specimen (n = 46). In relative terms, prefrontal white matter shows the largest difference between human and nonhuman, whereas gray matter shows no significant difference. This suggests that connectional elaboration (as gauged by white matter volume) played a key role in human brain evolution.

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Figure 1: Three-dimensional renderings, from left lateral, anterior, and superior views (in correct left-right orientation as shown), indicating the cortical portions designated prefrontal in this study for a representative of each species.
Figure 2: Percentage of cerebral volume that is prefrontal for individual specimens in 11 primate species.
Figure 3: Relationship between the proportion of total white matter volume anterior to the corpus callosum (prefrontal percentage white) compared with proportion of total gray matter anterior to the corpus callosum (prefrontal percentage gray).
Figure 4: Relationships between prefrontal and non-prefrontal cerebral volume for all 46 specimens from 11 primate species.
Figure 5: Segmentation examples.
Figure 6: Effect of blurring on segmentation.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Rilling and T. Insel for allowing us to analyze their collection of primate brain scans, and M. Grossman for six human male brains. S. Langin-Hooper and P. Silverman helped with data processing. We also thank the subjects who allowed themselves to be scanned.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, 3260 South St., Philadelphia, 19104-6398, Pennsylvania, USA

    P Thomas Schoenemann, Michael J Sheehan & L Daniel Glotzer

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  1. P Thomas Schoenemann
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Correspondence to P Thomas Schoenemann.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Table 1

Effects of blurring on volume estimation. (PDF 40 kb)

Supplementary Table 2

Average absolute and relative voxel sizes. (PDF 48 kb)

Supplementary Table 3

Effects of increasing voxel size on volume estimation. (PDF 57 kb)

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Schoenemann, P., Sheehan, M. & Glotzer, L. Prefrontal white matter volume is disproportionately larger in humans than in other primates. Nat Neurosci 8, 242–252 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1394

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