Perceived egocentric distance sensitivity and invariance across scene-selective cortex

Persichetti, Andrew; Dilks, Daniel D.

doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2016.02.006

Cited by 52 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Importantly, the pattern of responses in OPA was not driven by domain-general motion sensitivity or low-level visual information. These findings are consistent with a recent hypothesis that the scene processing system may be composed of two distinct systems: one system supporting navigation (including OPA, RSC, or both), and a second system supporting other aspects of scene processing, such as scene categorization (e.g., recognizing a kitchen versus a beach) (including PPA) (Dilks et al, 2011; Persichetti & Dilks, 2016). This functional division of labor mirrors the well-established division of labor in object processing between the dorsal (“how”) stream, implicated in visually-guided action, and the ventral (“what”) stream, implicated in object recognition (Goodale & Milner, 1992).…”

Section: 4 Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…If a region represents first-person perspective motion through scenes, then it should respond significantly more to the Dynamic Scene condition than the Static Scene condition (p = 0.01, FWE corrected). We found several regions showing this pattern of results: i) the left lateral superior occipital lobe (which overlapped with OPA as defined in a comparable group-level contrast of scenes vs. objects using data from the Localizer scans), consistent with the above ROI analysis; ii) a contiguous swath of cortex in both hemispheres extending from the lateral superior occipital lobe into the parietal lobe, including the intraparietal sulcus and superior parietal lobule, consistent with other studies implicating these regions in navigation (Burgess, 2008; Kravitz, Saleem, Baker, & Mishkin, 2011; Marchette et al, 2014; Persichetti & Dilks, 2016; Spiers & Maguire, 2007; van Assche, Kebets, Vuilleumier, & Assal, 2016); and iii) the right and left precentral gyrus, perhaps reflecting motor imagery related to the task (Malouin, Richards, Jackson, Dumas, & Doyon, 2003). Crucially, none of these regions showed overlapping activation in the contrast of Dynamic Faces vs. Static Faces (p = 0.01, FWE corrected), suggesting that this activation is specific to motion information in scenes.…”

Section: 3 Resultssupporting

confidence: 85%

“…For example, OPA and RSC are sensitive to two essential kinds of information for navigation: sense (i.e., left versus right) and egocentric distance (i.e., near versus far from me) information (Dilks, Julian, Kubilius, Spelke, & Kanwisher, 2011; Persichetti & Dilks, 2016). By contrast, PPA is not sensitive to either sense or egocentric distance information.…”

Section: 1 Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By contrast, PPA is not sensitive to either sense or egocentric distance information. The discovery of such differential sensitivity to navigationally-relevant information across scene-selective cortex has lead to the hypothesis that OPA and RSC directly support navigation, while PPA does not (Dilks et al, 2011; Persichetti & Dilks, 2016). Further studies suggest that there may be a division of labor even among those regions involved in navigation, although this hypothesis has never been tested directly.…”

Section: 1 Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The occipital place area represents first-person perspective motion information through scenes

Kamps

Lall

Dilks

2016

Cortex

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Neuroimaging studies have identified multiple scene-selective regions in human cortex, but the precise role each region plays in scene processing is not yet clear. It was recently hypothesized that two regions, the occipital place area (OPA) and the retrosplenial complex (RSC), play a direct role in navigation, while a third region, the parahippocampal place area (PPA), does not. Some evidence suggests a further division of labor even among regions involved in navigation: While RSC is thought to support navigation through the broader environment, OPA may be involved in navigation through the immediately visible environment, although this role for OPA has never been tested. Here we predict that OPA represents first-person perspective motion information through scenes, a critical cue for such “visually-guided navigation”, consistent with the hypothesized role for OPA. Response magnitudes were measured in OPA (as well as RSC and PPA) to i) video clips of first-person perspective motion through scenes (“Dynamic Scenes”), and ii) static images taken from these same movies, rearranged such that first-person perspective motion could not be inferred (“Static Scenes”). As predicted, OPA responded significantly more to the Dynamic than Static Scenes, relative to both RSC and PPA. The selective response in OPA to Dynamic Scenes was not due to domain-general motion sensitivity or to low-level information inherited from early visual regions. Taken together, these findings suggest the novel hypothesis that OPA may support visually-guided navigation, insofar as first-person perspective motion information is useful for such navigation, while RSC and PPA support other aspects of navigation and scene recognition.

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Section: 4 Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: 3 Resultssupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: 1 Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: 1 Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The occipital place area represents first-person perspective motion information through scenes

Kamps

Lall

Dilks

2016

Cortex

Self Cite

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“…It has recently been proposed that, within the scene-selective network, the OPA is particularly well suited for guiding navigation in local space (26), although there is also evidence that it plays a role in scene categorization (27,28). The OPA is sensitive to changes in the chirality (i.e., mirror-image flips) and egocentric depth of visual scenes (26,29), both of which reflect changes in navigationally relevant spatial parameters. A recent study using transcranial magnetic stimulation showed that the OPA has a causal role in perceiving spatial relationships between objects and environmental boundaries, but not between objects and other objects (30).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coding of navigational affordances in the human visual system

Bonner

Epstein

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

179

192

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A central component of spatial navigation is determining where one can and cannot go in the immediate environment. We used fMRI to test the hypothesis that the human visual system solves this problem by automatically identifying the navigational affordances of the local scene. Multivoxel pattern analyses showed that a scene-selective region of dorsal occipitoparietal cortex, known as the occipital place area, represents pathways for movement in scenes in a manner that is tolerant to variability in other visual features. These effects were found in two experiments: One using tightly controlled artificial environments as stimuli, the other using a diverse set of complex, natural scenes. A reconstruction analysis demonstrated that the population codes of the occipital place area could be used to predict the affordances of novel scenes. Taken together, these results reveal a previously unknown mechanism for perceiving the affordance structure of navigable space.scene-selective visual cortex | occipital place area | affordances | navigation | dorsal stream I t has long been hypothesized that perceptual systems are optimized for the processing of features that afford ecologically important behaviors (1, 2). This perspective has gained renewed support from recent work on action planning, which suggests that the action system continually prepares multiple, parallel plans that are appropriate for the environment (3, 4). If this view is correct, then sensory systems should be routinely engaged in identifying the potential of the environment for action, and they should explicitly and automatically encode these action affordances. Here we explore this idea for spatial navigation, a behavior that is essential for survival and ubiquitous among mobile organisms.A critical component of spatial navigation is the ability to understand where one can and cannot go in the local environment: for example, knowing that one can exit a room through a corridor or a doorway but not through a window or a painting on the wall. We reasoned that if perceptual systems routinely extract the parameters of the environment that delimit potential actions, then these navigational affordances should be automatically encoded during scene perception, even when subjects are not engaged in a navigational task.Previous work has shown that observers can determine the overall navigability of a scene-for example, whether it is possible to move through the scene or not-from a brief glance (5). However, no study has examined the coding of fine-grained navigational affordances, such as whether the direction one can move in the scene is to the left or to the right. Furthermore, only recently have investigators begun to characterize the affordance properties of scenes, and this work has focused not on navigational affordances but on more abstract behavioral events that can be used to define scene categories, such as cooking and sleeping (6). It therefore remains unknown whether navigational affordances play a fundamental role in the perception of visual scenes, an...

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The role of the parahippocampal cortex in landmark‐based distance estimation based on the contextual hypothesis

Liang

Liao

et al. 2022

Human Brain Mapping

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Parahippocampal cortex (PHC) is a vital neural bases in spatial navigation. However, its functional role is still unclear. “Contextual hypothesis,” which assumes that the PHC participates in processing the spatial association between the landmark and destination, provides a potential answer to the question. Nevertheless, the hypothesis was previously tested using the picture categorization task, which is indirectly related to spatial navigation. By now, study is still needed for testing the hypothesis with a navigation‐related paradigm. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis by an fMRI experiment in which participants performed a distance estimation task in a virtual environment under three different conditions: landmark free (LF), stable landmark (SL), and ambiguous landmark (AL). By analyzing the behavioral data, we found that the presence of an SL improved the participants' performance in distance estimation. Comparing the brain activity in SL‐versus‐LF contrast as well as AL‐versus‐LF contrast, we found that the PHC was activated by the SL rather than by AL when encoding the distance. This indicates that the PHC is elicited by strongly associated context and encodes the landmark reference for distance perception. Furthermore, accessing the representational similarity with the activity of the PHC across conditions, we observed a high similarity within the same condition but low similarity between conditions. This result indicated that the PHC sustains the contextual information for discriminating between scenes. Our findings provided insights into the neural correlates of the landmark information processing from the perspective of contextual hypothesis.

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Perceived egocentric distance sensitivity and invariance across scene-selective cortex

Cited by 52 publications

References 58 publications

The occipital place area represents first-person perspective motion information through scenes

The occipital place area represents first-person perspective motion information through scenes

Coding of navigational affordances in the human visual system

The role of the parahippocampal cortex in landmark‐based distance estimation based on the contextual hypothesis

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