YNiC Seminar

Title: The Representation of Scenes in the Brain

Human ventral visual cortex has been noted to contain regions showing selectivity for place scenes.  Such regions include the Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA), Retrosplenial Complex (RSC) and the Transverse Occipital Sulcus / Occipital Place Area (TOS / OPA).  Multivariate analyses can decode scene category from the neural activity patterns in these regions elicited by viewing scenes.  This suggests that the representation of scenes in these regions may be topographically organized along the basis of scene category.  However, it remains unclear whether scene category is the best descriptor, or whether lower-level perceptual dimensions may further underlie this organization.  For instance, it has also been shown that the PPA demonstrates a bias towards the high- over the low-spatial frequency content of both scene and non-scene images.  A key question then is to what degree higher-level dimensions (such as scene category) and lower-level dimensions (such as spatial frequency) may predict the topographic organization of scene selective regions.  In this study we aim to directly compare and contrast the relative contributions of scene category and spatial frequency information to the responses in scene selective regions.