Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Visual scene processing in familiar and unfamiliar environments.

Russell A Epstein1, J Stephen Higgins, Karen Jablonski

  • 1Dept. of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA, 19104-6241, USA. epstein@psych.upenn.edu

Journal of Neurophysiology
|March 23, 2007
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Distinct Mechanisms for Panoramic and Landmark-Based View Integration in Human Place-Selective Cortex.

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience·2025
Same author

Cognitive maps for hierarchical spaces in the human brain.

Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)·2025
Same author

A Neural Compass in the Human Brain during Naturalistic Virtual Navigation.

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience·2025
Same author

Cognitive maps for hierarchical spaces in the human brain.

bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology·2025
Same author

Distinct mechanisms for panoramic and landmark-based view integration in human scene-selective cortex.

bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology·2025
Same author

Distinct neural mechanisms for heading retrieval and context recognition in the hippocampus during spatial reorientation.

Nature communications·2024

Familiarity with a location enhances neural processing in scene-selective brain regions, particularly the retrosplenial cortex (RSC). This suggests these areas are crucial for extracting navigational information from visual scenes.

Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Visual Perception

Background:

  • Humans and animals rely on visual scene information for spatial orientation.
  • Neural systems for scene perception are known, but the impact of experience remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how prior experience with visual scenes influences processing in scene-selective brain regions.
  • To determine the role of familiarity in neural representations of locations.

Main Methods:

  • Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to scan participants viewing familiar and unfamiliar location images.
  • Repetition suppression (RS) effects were examined to assess viewpoint specificity and invariance.

Main Results:

Related Experiment Videos

  • Scene-selective regions, including the parahippocampal place area (PPA), retrosplenial cortex (RSC), and transverse occipital sulcus (TOS), showed stronger responses to familiar locations.
  • The RSC exhibited the most significant increase in response to familiar scenes (>50%).
  • Viewpoint invariance increased with scene familiarity within a scan session, but only for between-trial repetitions.

Conclusions:

  • Sensitivity to environmental familiarity in PPA, RSC, and TOS supports their role in extracting navigational information.
  • Neural representations of locations become enriched with familiarity, but viewpoint invariance does not change.
  • Within- and between-trial RS effects may reflect different aspects of visual scene processing.