The microstructure of cells within human cerebral cortex varies across the cortical ribbon, where changes in cytoarchitecture and myeloarchitecture are thought to endow each region of cortex with its unique function. While fine-scale relative to a cell, these population-level changes impact architectural properties of cortex measurable in vivo by noninvasive MRI, such as the thickness and myelin content of cortex. This raises the question of whether or not we can use these in vivo architectural measures to understand cortical organization, function, and development more broadly. Using human visual cortex as a test bed, we found two architectural gradients, which not only underlie its structural and functional organization, but additionally predict the presence of new visual field maps and capture the lifespan trajectory and its behavioral relevance. These findings provide a more general framework for understanding visual cortex, showing that architectural gradients are a measurable fingerprint of functional organization and ontogenetic routines in the human brain.

Shared architectural patterns across the human cortical mantle predict visual representations and capture behavior across the lifespan