ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2014
Evidence for evolutionary specialization in human limbic structures.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 93 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Oxygen and the Spark of Human Brain Evolution: Complex Interactions of Metabolism and Cortical Expansion across Development and Evolution.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2024Article
- Transcutaneous Auricular Vagus Nerve Stimulation to Improve Emotional State.Biomedicines · 2024Review
- Depression in adolescence and young adulthood: the difficulty to integrate motivational/emotional systems.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- The molecular genetic landscape of human brain size variation.Cell reports · 2023Article
- Cortical-subcortical interactions in goal-directed behavior.Physiological reviews · 2023Review
- Multiple routes of communication within the amygdala-mPFC network: A comparative approach in humans and macaques.Current research in neurobiology · 2023Review
- Representations and decodability of diverse cognitive functions are preserved across the human cortex, cerebellum, and subcortex.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Young transposable elements rewired gene regulatory networks in human and chimpanzee hippocampal intermediate progenitors.Development (Cambridge, England) · 2022Article
- A multimodal study regarding neural correlates of the subjective well-being in healthy individuals.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Functional parcellation of human and macaque striatum reveals human-specific connectivity in the dorsal caudate.NeuroImage · 2021Article
- Mental time travel, language evolution, and human self-domestication.Cognitive processing · 2021Article
- Decreased density of cholinergic interneurons in striatal territories in Williams syndrome.Brain structure & function · 2020Article
- A new vista in psychiatric treatment: Using individualized functional connectivity to track symptoms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Increasingly, functional and evolutionary research has highlighted the important contribution emotion processing makes to complex human social cognition. As such, it may be asked whether neural structures involved in emotion processing, commonly referred to as limbic structures, have been impacted in human brain evolution. To address this question, we performed an extensive evolutionary analysis of multiple limbic structures using modern phylogenetic tools. For this analysis, we combined new volumetric data for the hominoid (human and ape) amygdala and 4 amygdaloid nuclei, hippocampus, and striatum, collected using stereological methods in complete histological series, with previously published datasets on the amygdala, orbital and medial frontal cortex, and insula, as well as a non-limbic structure, the dorsal frontal cortex, for contrast. We performed a parallel analysis using large published datasets including many anthropoid species (human, ape, and monkey), but fewer hominoids, for the amygdala and 2 amygdaloid subdivisions, hippocampus, schizocortex, striatum, and septal nuclei. To address evolutionary change, we compared observed human values to values predicted from regressions run through (a) non-human hominoids and (b) non-human anthropoids, assessing phylogenetic influence using phylogenetic generalized least squares regression. Compared with other hominoids, the volumes of the hippocampus, the lateral nucleus of the amygdala, and the orbital frontal cortex were, respectively, 50, 37, and 11% greater in humans than predicted for an ape of human hemisphere volume, while the medial and dorsal frontal cortex were, respectively, 26 and 29% significantly smaller. Compared with other anthropoids, only human values for the striatum fell significantly below predicted values. Overall, the data present support for the idea that regions involved in emotion processing are not necessarily conserved or regressive, but may even be enhanced in recent human evolution.
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