Neural Representations in the Prefrontal Cortex Are Task Dependent for Scene Attributes But Not for Scene Categories.

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience
Yaelan Jung, Dirk B Walther

Abstract

Natural scenes deliver rich sensory information about the world. Decades of research has shown that the scene-selective network in the visual cortex represents various aspects of scenes. However, less is known about how such complex scene information is processed beyond the visual cortex, such as in the prefrontal cortex. It is also unknown how task context impacts the process of scene perception, modulating which scene content is represented in the brain. In this study, we investigate these questions using scene images from four natural scene categories, which also depict two types of scene attributes, temperature (warm or cold), and sound level (noisy or quiet). A group of healthy human subjects from both sexes participated in the present study using fMRI. In the study, participants viewed scene images under two different task conditions: temperature judgment and sound-level judgment. We analyzed how these scene attributes and categories are represented across the brain under these task conditions. Our findings show that scene attributes (temperature and sound level) are only represented in the brain when they are task relevant. However, scene categories are represented in the brain, in both the parahippocampal place area and...Continue Reading

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