Enlargement of the human prefrontal cortex and brain mentalizing . . . The present study showed that, compared to chimpanzees, humans had a significantly larger and more expanded prefrontal cortex (frontal lobe excluding the precentral gyrus, i e , FrS, FrM, and FrI), particularly the frontal pole (#1), DPFC (#2), and posteroinferior frontal gyrus (#3; Figs 4 and 5), which has been reported previously
Brain Size and Folding of the Human Cerebral Cortex The expansion of the cerebral cortex, and in particular that of its prefrontal region, is a major evolutionary landmark in the emergence of human cognition Our results suggest that this may be, at least in part, a natural outcome of increasing brain size
Prefrontal white matter volume is disproportionately larger in humans . . . In relative terms, prefrontal white matter shows the largest difference between human and nonhuman, whereas gray matter shows no significant difference This suggests that connectional elaboration (as gauged by white matter volume) played a key role in human brain evolution
THE BRAIN FROM TOP TO BOTTOM The main reason that the prefrontal cortex is slightly larger relative to the rest of the brain in humans than in most other primates is that humans have a larger volume of white matter in their prefrontal cortex
Normative brain size variation and brain shape diversity in humans Using in vivo neuroimaging data from more than 3000 individuals, we find that larger human brains show greater areal expansion in distributed frontoparietal cortical networks and related subcortical regions than in limbic, sensory, and motor systems
Evolution of the Brain: In Humans – Specializations in a Comparative . . . Nonetheless, the prefrontal part of the neocortex in humans displays a greater amount of gyrification than would be expected for an anthropoid primate of the same size [2] This suggests that relatively more cortical tissue is buried within sulci in the human prefrontal cortex, which may correlate with enhancement of the
A Quantitative Assessment of Prefrontal Cortex in Humans Relative to . . . 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
Evolution of the human brain: when bigger is better - Frontiers Humans deviate from other primates in having a greater width of minicolumns in specific cortical areas, especially in the prefrontal cortex, owing to constituents of the peripheral neuropil space (Buxhoeveden and Casanova, 2002; Semendeferi et al , 2011)