An anthropoid/strepsirrhine divergence in ventral visual stream connectivity

TL;DR

This paper shows how the brain's visual processing pathways differ between anthropoid and strepsirrhine primates, revealing evolutionary changes in brain connectivity.

Contribution

The study introduces a data-driven method to analyze white matter connectivity in primates, revealing new insights into anthropoid brain evolution.

Findings

Anthropoids show more dorsal prefrontal innervation of ventral visual connections compared to strepsirrhines.

The study supports the hypothesis of extensive reorganization in anthropoid gray and white matter.

The method enables future research on white matter connectivity in understudied primate species.

Abstract

The ventral visual stream has undergone extensive reorganization within the primate lineage. While some work has examined restructuring of the ventral prefrontal cortical gray matter across primates, comparative studies of white matter connectivity are lacking primarily due to difficulties in data acquisition and processing. Here, we present a data-driven approach to the study of white matter connectivity using postmortem diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. With this approach, we reconstruct anterior temporal-frontal and occipitotemporal-frontal connections across 2 anthropoids and 1 strepsirrhine: the rhesus macaque, the black-capped squirrel monkey, and the ring-tailed lemur. We find that the anthropoids exhibit more dorsal prefrontal innervation of these ventral visual connections. This study supports the hypothesis that anthropoid primates underwent extensive reorganization of both gray and white matter during their emergence as visual foragers in a complex ecological niche. The data-driven techniques presented here enable further research on white matter connectivity in previously understudied species.

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