A Quantitative Assessment of Prefrontal Cortex in Humans Relative to Nonhuman Primates

Abstract

Humans have the largest cerebral cortex among primates. A long-standing controversy is whether association cortex, particularly prefrontal cortex (PFC), is disproportionately larger in humans compared to nonhuman primates, as some studies report that human PFC is relatively expanded whereas others report uniform PFC scaling. We address this controversy using MRI-derived cortical surfaces of many individual humans, chimpanzees, and macaques. We present two parcellation-based PFC delineations based on cytoarchitecture and function and show that a previously used morphological surrogate (cortex anterior to the genu of the corpus callosum) substantially underestimates PFC extent, especially in humans. We find that the proportion of cortical gray matter occupied by PFC in humans is up to 86% larger than in macaques and 24% larger than in chimpanzees. The disparity is even greater for PFC white matter volume, which is 140% larger in humans compared to macaques and 71% larger than in chimpanzees.