Cortical thickness correlates with impulsiveness in healthy adults

Impulsiveness is a central domain of human personality and of relevance for the development of substance use and certain psychiatric disorders. This study investigates whether there are overlapping as well as distinct structural cerebral correlates of attentional, motor and nonplanning impulsiveness in healthy adults. High-resolution magnetic resonance scans were acquired in 32 healthy adults to model the gray–white and gray–cerebrospinal fluid borders for each individual cortex and to compute the distance of these surfaces as a measure of cortical thickness (CT). Associations between CT and the dimensions of impulsiveness (Barratt-Impulsiveness-Scale 11, BIS) were identified in entire cortex analyses. We observed a significant negative correlation between left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) CT and the attention BIS score (FDR p