Defining the most probable location of the parahippocampal place area using cortex-based alignment and cross-validation

Abstract

The parahippocampal place area (PPA) is a widely studied high-level visual region in the human brain involved in place and scene processing. The goal of the present study was to identify the most probable location of place-selective voxels in medial ventral temporal cortex. To achieve this goal, we first used cortex-based alignment (CBA) to create a probabilistic place-selective region of interest (ROI) from one group of 12 participants. We then tested how well this ROI could predict place selectivity in each hemisphere within a new group of 12 participants. Our results reveal that a probabilistic ROI (pROI) generated from one group of 12 participants accurately predicts the location and functional selectivity in individual brains from a new group of 12 participants, despite between subject variability in the exact location of place-selective voxels relative to the folding of parahippocampal cortex. Additionally, the prediction accuracy of our pROI is significantly higher than that achieved by volume-based Talairach alignment. Comparing the location of the pROI of the PPA relative to published data from over 500 participants, including data from the Human Connectome Project, shows a striking convergence of the predicted location of the PPA and the cortical location of voxels exhibiting the highest place selectivity across studies using various methods and stimuli. Specifically, the most predictive anatomical location of voxels exhibiting the highest place selectivity in medial ventral temporal cortex is the junction of the collateral and anterior lingual sulci. Methodologically, we make this pROI freely available (vpnl.stanford.edu/PlaceSelectivity), which provides a means to accurately identify a functional region from anatomical MRI data when fMRI data are not available (for example, in patient populations). Theoretically, we consider different anatomical and functional factors that may contribute to the consistent anatomical location of place selectivity relative to the folding of high-level visual cortex.

Human visual cortex is organized along two genetically opposed hierarchical gradients with unique developmental and evolutionary origins

“…For example, areas composing the visual processing hierarchy have been identified in living brains using anatomical and functional magnetic resonance imaging [2][3][4][5][6] , as well as in postmortem brains based on cytoarchitecture [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] , myeloarchitecture 14,15 , and receptor architecture [16][17][18] . Interestingly, and contrary to classic findings [19][20][21][22] , recent research in human postmortem brains indicates a tight correspondence between cellular transitions of cytoarchitectonic areas and cortical folding across the visual hierarchy 13,[23][24][25] . Similarly, recent research also indicates a tight correspondence between functional regions and cortical folding across the visual hierarchy for early 26 , middle [27][28][29] , and late 23,24,30 visual regions.…”

“…Interestingly, and contrary to classic findings [19][20][21][22] , recent research in human postmortem brains indicates a tight correspondence between cellular transitions of cytoarchitectonic areas and cortical folding across the visual hierarchy 13,[23][24][25] . Similarly, recent research also indicates a tight correspondence between functional regions and cortical folding across the visual hierarchy for early 26 , middle [27][28][29] , and late 23,24,30 visual regions. In terms of the latter, this striking consistency is conserved across development [30][31][32][33][34] , and is causally implicated in different aspects of visual perception [35][36][37][38][39] .…”

White matter fascicles and cortical microstructure predict reading-related responses in human ventral temporal cortex

“…The interplay between brain structure and function in concerting human cognition has spiked considerable interest in recent years. One of the most fascinating observations in this context is the consistent spatial arrangement of category-selective regions in ventral temporal cortex (VTC) across individuals Grill-Spector and Weiner, 2014;Kanwisher, 2010;Weiner et al, 2018;Weiner and Grill-Spector, 2010). VTC contains several visual category-selective regions that respond more strongly to their preferred category than others, including regions that are selective to faces (Kanwisher et al, 1997), scenes (Epstein and Kanwisher, 1998), bodies (Peelen and Downing, 2005), words (Cohen et al, 2000) and possibly numbers (Grotheer et al, 2016b(Grotheer et al, , 2016aShum et al, 2013, but see Grotheer et al, 2018).…”

Individual-subject functional localization increases univariate activation but not multivariate pattern discriminability in the ‘multiple-demand’ frontoparietal network

“…In this approach, participants perform a short task in addition to the main task in the scanning session, and the data from this task is used to localize regions-of-interest to be tested with data from the main task. This method is commonly used in vision research (Erez & Yovel, 2014;Lafer-Sousa, Conway, & Kanwisher, 2016;Reddy & Kanwisher, 2007;Weiner et al, 2018). For example, specific tasks are used to identify regions in individuals that are recruited for face processing (Berman et al, 2010;Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997) and object processing (Malach et al, 1995).…”