Signposts in the Fog: Objects Facilitate Scene Representations in Left Scene-selective Cortex.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Neuroimaging
• Visual Perception

Background:

• The brain constructs internal representations of environments, even with limited visual information.
• Object cues are crucial for disambiguating scenes, aiding in environmental understanding.
• Previous research explored how scenes influence object perception; this study investigates the reverse.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine how objects facilitate the neural representation of scene layout.
• To investigate the role of scene-selective areas in processing object-driven scene inferences.

Main Methods:

• fMRI decoding was employed to analyze neural representations in scene-selective areas (parahippocampal place area [PPA] and occipital place area [OPA]).
• Classifiers were trained on fully visible indoor and outdoor scenes.
• Classifiers were tested on blurred scenes (difficult to categorize alone) with and without object cues to assess classification accuracy.

Main Results:

• A significant improvement in scene classification was observed in the left PPA and OPA when objects were present in blurred scenes.
• This facilitation occurred despite reduced low-level visual feature overlap between blurred and training stimuli.
• Object-driven scene representation was specific to the left PPA/OPA, with no similar effect found in the right PPA/OPA or other visual areas.

Conclusions:

• Left PPA/OPA plays a distinct role in representing inferred scene layout, utilizing contextual object information.
• Right PPA/OPA appears primarily involved in processing the visual features of a scene.
• Findings highlight lateralized functions within scene-selective cortex for scene representation and inference.