6. Correlations between inter-subject variability in tissue properties of human V1, V2, and V3

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Over the past several decades, neuroanatomy and neuroimaging research has revealed large individual differences in the size of the human visual cortex (Stensaas et al. 1974; Andrews et al. 1997; Dougherty et al. 2003). Further studies have documented covariance amongst the size of visual areas, and between the size of visual areas and properties of other visual structures (Benson et al. 2022; Miyata et al. 2022). We wondered whether there was also substantial variability in the grey matter tissue microstructure of the visual cortex across individuals, and how such measures covary throughout the multiple cortical maps.. Recent advances in structural neuroimaging provide opportunities for characterising tissue properties of cortical areas using MRI. The ratio of T1- to T2-weighted signal intensity (T1w/T2w) has become a widely used semi-quantitative measure of tissue microstructure of the brain (Glasser & van Essen, 2011; Berman et al. 2022). Here, we analysed the Human Connectome Project 7T retinotopy dataset (Benson et al. 2018), to evaluate individual differences and covariance of T1w/T2w amongst early visual areas V1, V2, and V3.