Cortical diffusion restriction predicts individual cognitive ability and carries cellular information
Abstract
Whether the cellular architecture of the cerebral cortex constrains individual cognitive ability is a century-old question, open because its two methods do not meet. Histology resolves cells in tens of specimens; imaging reaches thousands of participants without a cellular quantity to measure. Here we show that standard diffusion MRI carries one. The return-to-origin probability, a model-free measure of how tightly cortical tissue confines water at cellular scales, predicts individual cognitive ability out of sample. In 978 adults it predicts the shared variance of 22 cognitive measures (ρ = 0.19) above any test constituting it, while 21 self-report scales stay at chance. It reproduces in 1{,}012 participants of an ageing cohort on a routine two-shell acquisition, with accuracy still rising. The same profile recovers the layer thicknesses of a post-mortem cytoarchitectonic atlas and tracks cytoarchitecture in mouse cortex. Cellular hypotheses of cognition can now be tested in living cohorts.
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BibTeX
@misc{wassermann2026cortical,
title = {{Cortical diffusion restriction predicts individual cognitive ability and carries cellular information}},
author = {Demian Wassermann and Gabriela Gomez Jimenez and Reuben Dorent},
howpublished = {HAL},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
url = {https://inria.hal.science/hal-05765285v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-SA 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Cortical diffusion restriction predicts individual cognitive ability and carries cellular information
AU - Demian Wassermann
AU - Gabriela Gomez Jimenez
AU - Reuben Dorent
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/21
PB - HAL
UR - https://inria.hal.science/hal-05765285v1
AB - Whether the cellular architecture of the cerebral cortex constrains individual cognitive ability is a century-old question, open because its two methods do not meet. Histology resolves cells in tens of specimens; imaging reaches thousands of participants without a cellular quantity to measure. Here we show that standard diffusion MRI carries one. The return-to-origin probability, a model-free measure of how tightly cortical tissue confines water at cellular scales, predicts individual cognitive ability out of sample. In 978 adults it predicts the shared variance of 22 cognitive measures (ρ = 0.19) above any test constituting it, while 21 self-report scales stay at chance. It reproduces in 1{,}012 participants of an ageing cohort on a routine two-shell acquisition, with accuracy still rising. The same profile recovers the layer thicknesses of a post-mortem cytoarchitectonic atlas and tracks cytoarchitecture in mouse cortex. Cellular hypotheses of cognition can now be tested in living cohorts.
ER -