What do neuroanatomical networks reveal about the ontology of human cognitive abilities?

Daniel Kristanto; Xinyang Liu; Werner Sommer; Andrea Hildebrandt; Changsong Zhou

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104706

What do neuroanatomical networks reveal about the ontology of human cognitive abilities?

iScience. 2022 Jul 3;25(8):104706. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104706. eCollection 2022 Aug 19.

Authors

Daniel Kristanto^{1

2}, Xinyang Liu^{2

3}, Werner Sommer^{4

5}, Andrea Hildebrandt^{2

6}, Changsong Zhou^{1

7}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, Centre for Nonlinear Studies and Beijing-Hong Kong-Singapore Joint Centre for Nonlinear and Complex Systems (Hong Kong), Institute of Computational and Theoretical Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong.
² Department of Psychology, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany.
³ Shanghai Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics (Ministry of Education), School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, 200062 Shanghai, China.
⁴ Department of Psychology, Humboldt University at Berlin, 10117 Berlin, Germany.
⁵ Department of Psychology, Zhejiang Normal University, Jin Hua, China.
⁶ Research Center Neurosensory Science, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany.
⁷ Department of Physics, Zhejiang University, 310000 Hangzhou, China.

Abstract

Over the last decades, cognitive psychology has come to a fair consensus about the human intelligence ontological structure. However, it remains an open question whether anatomical properties of the brain support the same ontology. The present study explored the ontological structure derived from neuroanatomical networks associated with performance on 15 cognitive tasks indicating various abilities. Results suggest that the brain-derived (neurometric) ontology partly agrees with the cognitive performance-derived (psychometric) ontology complemented with interpretable differences. Moreover, the cortical areas associated with different inferred abilities are segregated, with little or no overlap. Nevertheless, these spatially segregated cortical areas are integrated via denser white matter structural connections as compared with the general brain connectome. The integration of ability-related cortical networks constitutes a neural counterpart to the psychometric construct of general intelligence, while the consistency and difference between psychometric and neurometric ontologies represent crucial pieces of knowledge for theory building, clinical diagnostics, and treatment.

Keywords: Cognitive neuroscience; Systems neuroscience.