Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, 61801, United States.
Department of City and Regional Planning, The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio, 43210, United States.
Sci Rep. 2017 Jan 10;7:40201. doi: 10.1038/srep40201.
Images of iconic buildings, such as the CN Tower, instantly transport us to specific places, such as Toronto. Despite the substantial impact of architectural design on people's visual experience of built environments, we know little about its neural representation in the human brain. In the present study, we have found patterns of neural activity associated with specific architectural styles in several high-level visual brain regions, but not in primary visual cortex (V1). This finding suggests that the neural correlates of the visual perception of architectural styles stem from style-specific complex visual structure beyond the simple features computed in V1. Surprisingly, the network of brain regions representing architectural styles included the fusiform face area (FFA) in addition to several scene-selective regions. Hierarchical clustering of error patterns further revealed that the FFA participated to a much larger extent in the neural encoding of architectural styles than entry-level scene categories. We conclude that the FFA is involved in fine-grained neural encoding of scenes at a subordinate-level, in our case, architectural styles of buildings. This study for the first time shows how the human visual system encodes visual aspects of architecture, one of the predominant and longest-lasting artefacts of human culture.
标志性建筑的图像，如加拿大国家电视塔（CN Tower），能立即将我们带到特定的地点，如多伦多。尽管建筑设计对人们对建筑环境的视觉体验有很大的影响，但我们对其在人脑中的神经表现知之甚少。在本研究中，我们发现了几个高级视觉脑区与特定建筑风格相关的神经活动模式，但初级视觉皮层（V1）中没有。这一发现表明，建筑风格的视觉感知的神经关联源自 V1 中计算的简单特征之外的特定风格的复杂视觉结构。令人惊讶的是，代表建筑风格的大脑区域网络除了几个场景选择性区域外，还包括梭状回面孔区（FFA）。错误模式的层次聚类进一步表明，FFA 比入门级场景类别更多地参与了建筑风格的神经编码。我们得出结论，FFA 参与了场景的精细神经编码，在我们的例子中，是建筑物的建筑风格。这项研究首次表明了人类视觉系统如何对建筑的视觉方面进行编码，建筑是人类文化中最主要和最持久的艺术之一。
