Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging repetition suppression to explore the neural representation of natural scenes
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Date
2013-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Natural scene perception is a fundamental cognitive process with great relevance to human cognition and behavior. The human brain and visual system constantly extracts information and context from natural scenes to make predictions about the future and plan behaviors. Previous research has identified the parahippocampal place area (PPA), the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), and the transverse occipital sulcus (TOS) as brain regions responsible for discriminating natural scene categories (Walther et al., 2009; Dilks et al., 2013) and determined that blocks of color photographs (which contain color, texture, and structure) and contour line drawings (which contain just structure) yield equivalent category-specific patterns of activation in PPA and RSC (Walther et al., 2011). Repetition suppression (RS) is the reduction in neural activation magnitude that occurs across multiple presentations of a stimulus (Grill-Spector et al., 2001). RS can be used to determine representational similarity for superficially different stimuli. To date, little research has investigated the role of structural information in the formation of neural representations for individual scenes within a category. We used fMRI to measure RS between pairs of color photographs and line drawings to explore what features are contained in neural representations for individual scenes in PPA, RSC, and TOS. Results indicate that individual color photographs and line drawings depicting the same scenes are representationally dissimilar in PPA, RSC, and TOS. While prior research shows that the structure of a scene is sufficient for PPA and RSC to encode scene category, the current study provides evidence that PPA, RSC, and TOS encode an array of information from individual scenes, including color, texture, and structure. This research expands scientific understanding of the neural processes underlying natural scene perception by highlighting the different information used to represent scene identity versus scene category.
Description
2 College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Scholarships
Department of Psychology Summer Research Fellowship
1st Place in Psychology at Denman Undergraduate Research Forum 2012
Presented at University of São Paulo International Symposium of Undergraduate Research through the Brazil Research Exchange Program
3rd Place in Psychology at Denman Undergraduate Research Forum 2013
Department of Psychology Summer Research Fellowship
1st Place in Psychology at Denman Undergraduate Research Forum 2012
Presented at University of São Paulo International Symposium of Undergraduate Research through the Brazil Research Exchange Program
3rd Place in Psychology at Denman Undergraduate Research Forum 2013
Keywords
cognitive neuroscience, fMRI, vision, natural scene perception