PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Linda Henriksson
AU  - Marieke Mur
AU  - Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
TI  - Rapid invariant encoding of scene layout in human OPA
AID  - 10.1101/577064
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 577064
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/14/577064.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/14/577064.full
AB  - Successful visual navigation requires a sense of the geometry of the local environment. How do our brains extract this information from retinal images? Here we visually presented scenes with all possible combinations of five scene-bounding elements (left, right and back wall, ceiling, floor) to human subjects during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). The fMRI response patterns in the scene-responsive occipital place area (OPA) reflected scene layout with invariance to changes in surface texture. This result contrasted sharply with the primary visual cortex (V1), which reflected low-level image features of the stimuli, and parahippocampal place area (PPA), which showed better texture than layout decoding. MEG indicated that the texture-invariant scene-layout representation is computed from visual input within ~100 ms, suggesting a rapid computational mechanism. Taken together, these results suggest that the cortical representation underlying our instant sense of the environmental geometry is located in OPA.