Abstract
Although macaques and marmosets are both primates of choice for studying the brain mechanisms of cognition, they differ in key aspects of anatomy and behavior. Interestingly, a recent connectomic analysis revealed that strong top-down projections from the prefrontal cortex to the posterior parietal cortex, present in macaques and important for executive function, are absent in marmosets. Here, we propose a consensus mapping that bridges the two species' cortical atlases and allows for direct area-to-area comparison of their connectomes, which are then used to build comparative computational large-scale modeling of the frontoparietal circuit for working memory. The macaque model exhibits resilience against distractors, a prerequisite for normal working memory function. By contrast, the marmoset model predicts a sensitivity to distractibility commonly observed behaviorally in this species. Surprisingly, this contrasting trend can be swapped by rescaling intrafrontal and frontoparietal connection weights and offers a credible prediction to the marmoset's behavior in this specific task.