Department of Psychology.
Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720.
J Neurosci. 2023 Apr 5;43(14):2552-2567. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1745-22.2023. Epub 2023 Feb 24.
Previous findings show that the morphology of folds (sulci) of the human cerebral cortex flatten during postnatal development. However, previous studies did not consider the relationship between sulcal morphology and cognitive development in individual participants. Here, we fill this gap in knowledge by leveraging cross-sectional morphologic neuroimaging data in the lateral PFC (LPFC) from individual human participants (6-36 years old, males and females; = 108; 3672 sulci), as well as longitudinal morphologic and behavioral data from a subset of child and adolescent participants scanned at two time points (6-18 years old; = 44; 2992 sulci). Manually defining thousands of sulci revealed that LPFC sulcal morphology (depth, surface area, and gray matter thickness) differed between children (6-11 years old)/adolescents (11-18 years old) and young adults (22-36 years old) cross-sectionally, but only cortical thickness showed differences across childhood and adolescence and presented longitudinal changes during childhood and adolescence. Furthermore, a data-driven approach relating morphology and cognition identified that longitudinal changes in cortical thickness of four left-hemisphere LPFC sulci predicted longitudinal changes in reasoning performance, a higher-level cognitive ability that relies on LPFC. Contrary to previous findings, these results suggest that sulci may flatten either after this time frame or over a longer longitudinal period of time than previously presented. Crucially, these results also suggest that longitudinal changes in the cortex within specific LPFC sulci are behaviorally meaningful, providing targeted structures, and areas of the cortex, for future neuroimaging studies examining the development of cognitive abilities. Recent work has shown that individual differences in neuroanatomical structures (indentations, or sulci) within the lateral PFC are behaviorally meaningful during childhood and adolescence. Here, we describe how specific lateral PFC sulci develop at the level of individual participants for the first time: from both cross-sectional and longitudinal perspectives. Further, we show, also for the first time, that the longitudinal morphologic changes in these structures are behaviorally relevant. These findings lay the foundation for a future avenue to precisely study the development of the cortex and highlight the importance of studying the development of sulci in other cortical expanses and charting how these changes relate to the cognitive abilities those areas support at the level of individual participants.
先前的研究结果表明，人类大脑皮层褶皱（脑沟）的形态在出生后发育过程中会变平。然而，之前的研究并没有考虑个体参与者脑沟形态与认知发展之间的关系。在这里，我们通过利用个体人类参与者外侧前额叶皮质（LPFC）的横向形态神经影像学数据（6-36 岁，男性和女性；n=108；3672 条脑沟），以及从两个时间点扫描的儿童和青少年参与者的纵向形态和行为数据（6-18 岁；n=44；2992 条脑沟），填补了这一知识空白。通过手动定义数千条脑沟，我们发现 LPFC 脑沟形态（深度、表面积和灰质厚度）在儿童（6-11 岁）/青少年（11-18 岁）和年轻成年人（22-36 岁）之间存在差异，但只有皮质厚度在儿童期和青春期之间存在差异，并在儿童期和青春期期间呈现出纵向变化。此外，一种将形态和认知联系起来的基于数据的方法表明，左侧 LPFC 四个脑沟的皮质厚度的纵向变化可以预测推理能力的纵向变化，推理能力是一种依赖于 LPFC 的高级认知能力。与之前的发现相反，这些结果表明，脑沟可能在这段时间之后或者在比之前提出的更长的纵向时间段内变平。至关重要的是，这些结果还表明，特定 LPFC 脑沟内的皮质的纵向变化具有行为意义，为未来研究认知能力发展的神经影像学研究提供了有针对性的结构和大脑皮层区域。最近的研究表明，外侧前额叶皮质（lateral prefrontal cortex）内的神经解剖结构（凹陷或脑沟）的个体差异在儿童和青少年时期具有行为意义。在这里，我们首次描述了这些特定的外侧前额叶皮质脑沟如何在个体参与者的水平上发展：从横向和纵向两个方面。此外，我们还首次表明，这些结构的纵向形态变化具有行为相关性。这些发现为未来精确研究大脑皮层发育奠定了基础，并强调了研究其他皮质扩张中脑沟发育的重要性，并绘制了这些变化与这些区域支持的认知能力之间的关系。
