Cognitive relevance of an evolutionarily new and variable prefrontal structure.

Identifying structural-functional correspondences is a major goal among biologists. In neurobiology, recent findings identify relationships between performance on cognitive tasks and the presence or absence of small, shallow indentations, or sulci, of the human brain. Here, we tested if the presence or absence of one such sulcus, the paraintermediate frontal sulcus (pimfs-v) in lateral prefrontal cortex, was related to relational reasoning in young adults from the Human Connectome Project (ages 22-36). After manually identifying 2,877 sulci across 144 hemispheres, our results indicate that the presence of the pimfs-v in the left hemisphere was associated with a 21-34% higher performance on a relational reasoning task. These findings have direct developmental and evolutionary relevance as recent work shows that the presence or absence of the pimfs-v is also related to reasoning performance in a pediatric cohort, and that the pimfs-v is exceedingly rare in chimpanzees. Thus, the pimfs-v is a novel developmental, cognitive, and evolutionarily relevant feature that should be considered in future studies examining how the complex relationships among multiscale anatomical and functional features of the brain give rise to abstract thought.