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Poster D in Poster Session D: Wednesday, August 5, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Robustness and Efficiency Organize Neural Wiring Across Primate Clades

Ittai Shamir¹; ¹Weizmann Institute of Science

Presenter: Ittai Shamir

Structural connectomes quantify neural wiring, bridging anatomy and function across species. Prior work in neural coding suggests a tradeoff between robustness and efficiency, with macaques showing greater robustness and humans greater efficiency. Here, we test whether this principle extends to neural wiring across primate evolution. We analyzed diffusion MRI connectomes from 54 primates spanning 24 species across five clades. Networks were characterized using graph-theoretic measures and spectral properties of the normalized Laplacian, normalized to degree-preserving random networks. We find a consistent tradeoff: nonhuman primates exhibit greater robustness, whereas humans show increased efficiency and complexity. These properties vary systematically across clades, indicating a gradual evolutionary change rather than a discrete species difference. Our findings extend this tradeoff to the structural domain, linking neural coding and wiring within a unified framework. These results suggest that primate brain evolution is constrained by a fundamental balance between structural resilience and computational efficiency.

Topic Area: Methods, Tools, Theory & Neural Coding