Fernanda L. Ribeiro^1,2,3,4 (), Felix Hoffstaedter^5,6, Martin N. Hebart^1,3,4; ¹Department of Medicine, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany, ²School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Queensland, Australia, ³Vision and Computational Cognition Group, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany, ⁴Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior (CMBB), University of Marburg, Giessen and Darmstadt, Germany, ⁵Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-7: Brain and Behaviour), Research Center Jülich, Germany, ⁶Institute of Systems Neuroscience, Medical Faculty, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany

Understanding how visual cortex organization changes across the lifespan may help elucidate visual performance variation within and across individuals. Previous work has demonstrated that more V1 cortical surface area is dedicated to representing the horizontal versus the vertical meridian, termed horizontal-vertical anisotropy (HVA), and more surface area to representing the lower versus the upper vertical meridian, termed vertical-meridian asymmetry (VMA) (Benson et al., 2021). Moreover, these asymmetries in cortical representation of the horizontal and vertical meridians vary between children and adults (Himmelberg et al., 2023), mirroring asymmetries in visual task performance around the visual field (Carrasco et al., 2022). Here, we investigate whether these age-related differences can be predicted from cortical geometry by retrospectively applying the deepRetinotopy toolbox (Ribeiro et al., 2025) to 11,060 anatomical scans. Specifically, we applied deepRetinotopy to the ABCD baseline cohort (n = 9,947; age 9-11) and the HCP Young Adult dataset (n = 1,113, age 22-36) to predict individual-level retinotopic organization from cortical folds, derived from T1-weighted images. Then, we estimated cortical VMA and HVA, operationalized as the difference between the surface area dedicated to representing two different portions of the visual field (horizontal versus vertical meridian for HVA; lower vertical versus upper vertical meridian for VMA) divided by the mean combined surface area. We found group differences in cortical VMA (higher VMA in adults compared to children; Cohen’s d = 0.18, p < 0.001) and HVA (higher HVA in adults compared to children; Cohen’s d = 0.09, p < 0.01), consistent with prior work. Importantly, because our predictions derive from cortical geometry alone, our findings reveal that asymmetries in how the visual cortex samples different meridians can arise from local changes in cortical geometry. More broadly, these findings demonstrate how deepRetinotopy enables investigating visual cortex organization across development and individuals at an unprecedented scale.

Acknowledgements: FLR acknowledges support through the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation funding program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project ID 101146996.