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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;N= 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;N= 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. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTRecent 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.
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This content will become publicly available on December 25, 2025
Anchoring Functional Connectivity to Individual Sulcal Morphology Yields Insights in a Pediatric Study of Reasoning
A salient neuroanatomical feature of the human brain is its pronounced cortical folding, and there is mounting evidence that sulcal morphology is relevant to functional brain architecture and cognition. However, the relationships between sulcal anatomy, brain activity, and behavior are still poorly understood. We previously found that the depth of three small, shallow sulci in the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) was linked to reasoning performance during development (Voorhies et al., 2021). These findings beg the question: What is the linking mechanism between sulcal morphology and cognition? Here, we investigated functional connectivity among sulci in LPFC and the lateral parietal cortex in participants drawn from the same sample as our previous study. We leveraged manual parcellations (21 sulci/hemisphere, 1,806 total) and functional magnetic resonance imaging data from a reasoning task from 43 participants aged 7–18 years (20 females). We conducted clustering and classification analyses of individual-level functional connectivity among sulci. Broadly, we found that (1) connectivity patterns of individual sulci could be differentiated and more accurately than cortical patches equated for size and shape; (2) sulcal connectivity did not consistently correspond with that of probabilistic labels or large-scale networks; (3) sulci clustered based on connectivity patterns, not dictated by spatial proximity; and (4) across individuals, greater depth was associated with higher network centrality for several sulci under investigation. These results illustrate how sulcal morphology can be functionally relevant and provide proof of concept that using sulci to define an individual coordinate space for functional connectomes is a promising future direction.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2042251
- PAR ID:
- 10591529
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.1523
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Journal of Neuroscience
- Volume:
- 45
- Issue:
- 26
- ISSN:
- 0270-6474
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: Article No. e0726242025
- Size(s):
- Article No. e0726242025
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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