Cortical Integration of Contextual Information across Objects

Abstract

Abstract■ Recognizing objects in the environment and understanding our surroundings often depends on context: the presence of other objects and knowledge about their relations with each other. Such contextual information activates a set of medial lobe brain regions, the parahippocampal cortex and the retrosplenial complex. Both regions are more activated by single objects with a unique contextual association than by objects not associated with any specific context. Similarly they are more activated by spatially coherent arrangements of objects when those are consistent with their known spatial relations. The current study tested how context in multiple-object displays is represented in these regions in the absence of relevant spatial information. Using an fMRI slow-event-related design, we show that the precuneus (a subpart of the retrosplenial complex) is more activated by simultaneously presented contextually related objects than by unrelated objects. This suggests that the representation of context in this region is cumulative, representing integrated information across objects in the display. We discuss these findings in relation to processing of visual information and relate them to previous findings of contextual effects in perception. ■

Two Distinct Scene-Processing Networks Connecting Vision and Memory

“…It is involved in memory for visual scene images ( Montaldi et al, 2006 ; Takashima et al, 2006 ; Elman et al, 2013 ; van Assche et al, 2016 ), learning navigational routes ( Burgess et al, 2001 ; Bray et al, 2015 ), and even imagining past events or future events in familiar places ( Hassabis et al, 2007 ; Szpunar et al, 2009 ). It can integrate information across space ( Livne and Bar, 2016 ) and time ( Lerner et al, 2011 ; Vilberg and Rugg, 2012 ), and has been shown in lesion studies to be critical for orientation and navigation ( Kravitz et al, 2011 ). Our connectivity results and meta-analysis suggest that cIPL may play a prominent role in connecting visual scenes to the real-world location they depict.…”

Intrusive effects of semantic information on visual selective attention

“…It also opens the question of the mechanism through which these high-level factors may affect the attentional distribution. Previous research has suggested that an object’s contextual associations are derived in the parahippocampal and retrosplenial cortices (Bar & Aminoff, 2003; Livne & Bar, 2016). These representations could potentially affect the spatially organized attentional priority map in inferior parietal sulcus (IPS, Sheremata & Silver, 2015), either directly, or indirectly by influencing object recognition processing regions in the inferior temporal cortex (Bar, 2004), before influencing activity in IPS.…”

Two distinct scene processing networks connecting vision and memory

“…It is involved in memory for visual scene images (Montaldi et al, 2006;Takashima et al, 2006;Elman et al, 2013;van Assche et al, 2016), learning navigational routes (Burgess et al, 2001;Bray et al, 2015), and even imagining past events or future events in familiar places (Hassabis et al, 2007;Szpunar et al, 2009). It can integrate information across space (Livne and Bar, 2016) and time (Lerner et al, 2011;Vilberg and Rugg, 2012), and has been shown in lesion studies to be critical for orientation and navigation (Kravitz et al, 2011). Our connectivity results and metaanalysis suggest that cIPL may play a prominent role in connecting visual scenes to the real-world location they depict.…”