The right planum polare is a cortical region located anterior to Heschl’s gyrus on the superior temporal plane, forming part of the anterior supratemporal auditory cortex within the temporal lobe. It lies rostral to the planum temporale and is structurally associated with the superior temporal gyrus and the auditory association cortex. Functionally, the planum polare is implicated in higher-order auditory processing, including analysis of complex sounds such as speech and music, and integration of spectral–temporal features. It participates in networks supporting auditory object recognition and may contribute to hemispheric specialization for processing certain aspects of prosody and complex acoustic patterns. There is no direct Wikipedia article on the planum polare; a related structure and broader context is the Superior temporal gyrus.
The right planum polare, a superior temporal lobe region involved in auditory and language processing, shows emerging but still limited direct genetic associations in large-scale imaging genetics datasets such as those based on the brainCOLOR atlas. GWAS of cortical surface area and thickness (e.g., ENIGMA, UK Biobank) have implicated common variants near genes involved in neurodevelopment, synaptic function, and cell adhesion (such as variants in or near genes like MIR137, CNTNAP2, and DCDC2 in broader temporal and language-related cortex), though these findings typically map to larger temporal regions that include the planum polare rather than isolating it specifically. Indirectly, genetic studies of language-related and auditory phenotypes, including dyslexia, specific language impairment, and autism spectrum disorder, have linked variants in genes such as FOXP2, KIAA0319, and CNTNAP2 to structural and functional differences in superior temporal regions encompassing the planum temporale and adjacent planum polare, with some evidence of altered asymmetry or cortical morphology. Additionally, polygenic risk for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression has been associated with structural changes in superior temporal cortex in imaging–genetics work, suggesting that many small-effect variants contributing to psychiatric risk may also influence morphometry of the right planum polare, although robust, region-specific SNPs for this exact parcel remain sparse and typically subthreshold after correction in current GWAS.
Overview generated by GPT-4o (2026).
Region ID: 96
Hemisphere: Right
Atlas: brainCOLOR
Full Quality Version: Download MP4
Full Quality Version: Download MP4
Full Quality Version: Download MP4
Full Quality Version: Download MP4
Wali Sidiqyar*, Gaurav Rudravaram*, Elyssa M. McMaster, Trent M. Schwartz, Adam M. Saunders, Kurt G. Schilling, Bennett A. Landman "Introducing SPINS: A Shared Public Visualization Library of Neuroanatomical Structures." Medical Imaging with Deep Learning- short paper
This resource is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal (Public Domain).