A Posterior–Anterior Distinction between Scene Perception and Scene Construction in Human Medial Parietal Cortex

Abstract

Human retrosplenial complex (RSC), located in medial parietal cortex, has been implicated in numerous cognitive functions, including scene perception, spatial navigation, and autobiographical memory retrieval. Recently, a posterior-anterior distinction within RSC was proposed, such that posterior aspects process scene-related visual information (constituting a medial place area [MPA]), whereas anterior aspects process information that is vividly retrieved from memory, thereby supporting remembering and potentially navigation. Here, we tested this proposed distinction in a single group of participants (both male and female) using fMRI with both perceptual and mnemonic tasks. After completing a resting-state scan, participants performed a task that required constructing scenes from memory and completed a scene selectivity localizer task. We tested directly perceptual and mnemonic responses in MPA and an anterior, connectivity-defined region (CON), which showed strong functional connectivity with anterior parahippocampal place area. A double dissociation was observed, such that CON was more strongly activated during scene construction than was MPA, whereas MPA was more perceptually responsive than CON. Further, peak responses from the scene construction task were anterior to perceptual peaks in all but 1 participant and hemisphere. Finally, through analyses of the posterior-anterior response profiles, we identify the fundus of the parieto-occipital sulcus as a potential location for the crossover from perceptual to mnemonic representations and highlight a potential left-hemisphere advantage for mnemonic representations. Collectively, our results support a distinction between posterior and anterior aspects of the RSC, suggesting that more specific functional-anatomic terms should be used in its place in future work.

Behavior-dependent directional tuning in the human visual-navigation network

“…4B). In the low-memory-error group the model predicted activity in a more anterior part, in the high-memory-error group in a more posterior part of the medial parietal lobe, akin to previous reports of an anterior-posterior functional distinction in this region (Silson et al, 2016(Silson et al, , 2019. Figure 4.…”

“…Importantly, the medial parietal lobe, which comprises the RSC, is known for both its perceptual and mnemonic capacities (O'Craven and Kanwisher, 2000), which might be topologically distributed. Previous work revealed an anterior-posterior distinction for scene construction and scene perception (Epstein and Baker, 2019;Silson et al, 2016Silson et al, , 2019. Our results (Fig.…”

Brain coding of social network structure

“…This finding was recently replicated and extended by another study that used recall of people and places and found the same posterior-anterior division between spatial and social processing (Silson et al, 2019a). In addition, comparison of scene viewing to other categories identifies the posterior region, retrosplenial complex, as scene-selective (Epstein, 2008;Epstein and Higgins, 2007;Silson et al, 2016Silson et al, , 2019b. The posterior-anterior division is supported by recent restingstate studies that divided the default-mode network into posterior and anterior components (Braga and Buckner, 2017;Braga et al, 2019).…”

Distinct subdivisions of human medial parietal cortex are recruited differentially for memory recall of places and people

“…Specifically, a small region of MPC directly anterior of scene-selective medial place area 7 (MPA) shows strong functional connectivity with anterior portions of scene-selective parahippocampal place area 18 (aPPA), located in medial VTC. This connectivity-defined region overlaps, qualitatively, with regions of MPC engaged during memory recall [2][3][4][5] , suggesting that the ventral/posterior aspect of MPC may contain distinct areas biased toward scene processing for vision and memory, respectively 19 .…”