File:Relative expansion along ecological dimensions reveals functionally associated areal patterns across the cortex.webp

English: "The changes in surface area between the extremes of synthetically generated linear combinations of pPCA modes associated with individual ecological variables are subjected to decoding via the NeuroSynth database. Correlation of the expansion maps and individual terms are colour-coded for each socio-ecological variable. Retaining the 99th percentile of most strongly correlated terms (Supplementary Data 3) indicate that these expansion maps encode related, semantically meaningful concepts, thus highlighting the association of evolutionary adaptive processes in both behavioural and ecological variables and cortical morphology."

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"Neuroecology of cortical morphology

The relationship between the morphology of a-priori defined cortical areas and sensory specialisation has been studied extensively in a variety of species, both in their natural state as well as by manipulation such as post-natal enucleation44. Using the common cortical reference space, we performed a data-driven analysis to study if the relationship between the morphology of cortical areas and sensory specialisation can be observed at the whole-brain level.

First, we performed phylogenetic principal component analysis (pPCA)45 to reduce the dimensionality of our dataset and tested for the association between the extracted modes of variation describing the shape of the cerebral cortex and ecological and behavioural niches. We found 5 pPCA components out of 21 (Supplementary Fig. 2) that showed significant (q < 0.05, Wilcoxon-Rank-Sum/Mann-Whitney U-Test, FDR corrected) association for any of the observed ecological and behavioural variables of arboreality, terrestriality, fossoriality or large group size. Despite the strong overlap with group size, no component was associated with diurnality. We then aggregated the information contained in the pPCA modes that showed a significant relationship to individual ecological factors (Supplementary Fig. 2). Based on these factors, we estimated the areal differences corresponding to each ecological variable and decoded the resulting expansion maps into neuroscientific concepts (Fig. 3; Supplementary Data 3)."