Team Motivation Brain & Behavior, ICM - Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, CNRS UMR 7225 - INSERM U1127 - UPMC UMR S 1127, Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France; UMR 7194 (HNHP), MNHN/CNRS/UPVD, Alliance Sorbonne Université, Musée de l'Homme, Paris, France.
Department of African Zoology, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium; Université Libre de Bruxelles, Laboratory of Histology and Neuropathology, Brussels, Belgium.
Cortex. 2019 Sep;118:262-274. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2019.03.019. Epub 2019 Apr 4.
To survive in complex and seasonal environments, primates are thought to rely upon cognitive capacities such as decision-making and episodic memory, which enable them to plan their daily foraging path. According to the Ecological Brain hypothesis, feeding ecology has driven the expansion of the brain to support the corresponding development of cognitive skills. Recent works in cognitive neurosciences indicate that cognitive operations such as decision-making or subjective evaluation (which are contextual and dependent upon episodic memory), relied critically upon a small part of the frontal lobe, often referred to as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). Several authors suggested that this area might be important for foraging, but this has never been tested. In the present study, we quantified the relation between the size of the VMPFC (along with other cerebral measures: the whole brain, the gyrus rectus and the somatosensory cortex) and key socio-ecological variables in five primate species (Macaca mulatta, Macaca fuscata, Gorilla gorilla, Pan troglodytes and Homo sapiens). We hypothesized that the size of the VMPFC would be greater in primates with a large dietary spectrum and complex foraging strategies. We also hypothesized that the impact of feeding ecology would be stronger on this specific region than on other regions (somatosensory cortex) or on more global cerebral measures (e.g., whole brain). In line with these hypotheses, we found that all cerebral measures were more strongly related to feeding ecology than group size, a proxy for social complexity. As expected, the VMPFC volume is more precisely related to feeding ecology than the whole brain, and appears to be critically related to dietary quality. Thus, combining a comparative approach with predictions coming both from behavioral ecology and cognitive neurosciences, our study provides evidence that feeding ecology played a key role in the development of specific cognitive skills, which rely upon the expansion of a specific cortical area.
为了在复杂且具有季节性的环境中生存,灵长类动物被认为依赖于决策和情景记忆等认知能力,这些能力使它们能够规划日常的觅食路径。根据生态大脑假说,进食生态学推动了大脑的扩张,以支持认知技能的相应发展。认知神经科学的最新研究表明,决策或主观评价等认知操作(这些操作与情景记忆有关且依赖于情景记忆)严重依赖于额叶的一小部分,通常称为腹内侧前额叶皮层(VMPFC)。一些作者认为,该区域可能对觅食很重要,但这从未得到过验证。在本研究中,我们量化了 VMPFC(以及其他大脑测量值:整个大脑、直回和躯体感觉皮层)的大小与五种灵长类动物(猕猴、黑长尾猴、大猩猩、黑猩猩和智人)的关键社会生态变量之间的关系。我们假设,VMPFC 的大小在具有广泛饮食谱和复杂觅食策略的灵长类动物中会更大。我们还假设,进食生态学对该特定区域的影响会强于对其他区域(躯体感觉皮层)或更全局的大脑测量值(例如,整个大脑)的影响。根据这些假设,我们发现所有大脑测量值与进食生态学的关系都比群体大小(社会复杂性的代表)更密切。正如预期的那样,VMPFC 体积与进食生态学的关系比整个大脑更密切,并且似乎与饮食质量密切相关。因此,我们的研究将比较方法与行为生态学和认知神经科学的预测相结合,为进食生态学在特定认知技能的发展中发挥关键作用提供了证据,而这些特定认知技能依赖于特定皮质区域的扩张。