When the FAT goes wide: Right extended Frontal Aslant Tract volume predicts performance on working memory tasks in healthy humans

The Frontal Aslant Tract (FAT) is a tract recently described as having implications on language function. The originally proposed anatomical FAT definition characterizes a connection between Broca’s territory and anterior supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas in the Superior Frontal Gyrus (SFG). Here we propose an extended definition of the FAT (the exFAT) that propagates more anteriorly into the SFG. A sample of 834 subjects from the WU-Minn HCP 900 subjects data release (S900) was selected. The bilateral exFATs were reconstructed for the whole sample using an automated pipeline and thresholded adjusted tract volumes were calculated. A laterality test was performed on the whole sample. The frontal cortex has known implications on superior cognitive functions, so here we evaluate the implications of exFAT volume on performance in a language task and on a set of working memory tasks. Two sub-samples of 70 subjects each were drawn from the S900 sample by selecting the 35 top-performers and 35 bottom-performers for both language and working memory tasks. Additional laterality tests were performed on each subsample. We did not find the exFAT to be lateralized in any of the samples. We found statistically significant differences in left adjusted exFAT volume between top-performers and bottom-performers in the language task. We also found statistically significant differences in right adjusted exFAT volume between top-performers and bottom-performers for 2-back working memory tasks. To check for the predictive power of the exFAT volumes as correlates for performance, we ran a repeated random sub-sampling cross-validation procedure based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier that was capable of correctly classifying holdout subjects to their corresponding group (top-performer vs bottom-performer) with an average accuracy of 74.5% for language task performance based on left exFAT volume and an accuracy of 64.2% for Working Memory performance based on right exFAT volume.