Parametric Coding of the Size and Clutter of Natural Scenes in the Human Brain

Soojin Park, Talia Konkle, Aude Oliva

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

69 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Estimating the size of a space and its degree of clutter are effortless and ubiquitous tasks of moving agents in a natural environment. Here, we examine how regions along the occipital-temporal lobe respond to pictures of indoor real-world scenes that parametrically vary in their physical "size" (the spatial extent of a space bounded by walls) and functional "clutter" (the organization and quantity of objects that fill up the space). Using a linear regression model on multivoxel pattern activity across regions of interest, we find evidence that both properties of size and clutter are represented in the patterns of parahippocampal cortex, while the retrosplenial cortex activity patterns are predominantly sensitive to the size of a space, rather than the degree of clutter. Parametric whole-brain analyses confirmed these results. Importantly, this size and clutter information was represented in a way that generalized across different semantic categories. These data provide support for a property-based representation of spaces, distributed across multiple scene-selective regions of the cerebral cortex.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1792-1805
Number of pages14
JournalCerebral Cortex
Volume25
Issue number7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2015 Jul 1

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

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