Department of Psychology, University of Northumbria, Ellison Pl., Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST, UK.
Department of Neuroradiology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Brain Struct Funct. 2019 Sep;224(7):2505-2524. doi: 10.1007/s00429-019-01901-0. Epub 2019 Jul 17.
The perception of a scene involves grasping the global space of the scene, usually called the spatial layout, as well as the objects in the scene and the relations between them. The main brain areas involved in scene perception, the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and retrosplenial cortex (RSC), are supposed to mostly support the processing of spatial layout. Here we manipulated the objects and their relations either by arranging objects within rooms in a common way or by scattering them randomly. The rooms were then varied for spatial layout by keeping or removing the walls of the room, a typical layout manipulation. We then combined a visual search paradigm, where participants actively search for an object within the room, with multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA). Both left and right PPA were sensitive to the layout properties, but the right PPA was also sensitive to the object relations even when the information about objects and their relations is used in the cross-categorization procedure on novel stimuli. The left and right RSC were sensitive to both spatial layout and object relations, but could only use the information about object relations for cross-categorization to novel stimuli. These effects were restricted to the PPA and RSC, as other control brain areas did not display the same pattern of results. Our results underline the importance of employing paradigms that require participants to explicitly retrieve domain-specific processes and indicate that objects and their relations are processed in the scene areas to a larger extent than previously assumed.
场景感知涉及到对场景全局空间的把握，通常称为空间布局，以及场景中的物体及其之间的关系。参与场景感知的主要大脑区域，即旁海马体位置区域（PPA）和后扣带皮层（RSC），主要支持空间布局的处理。在这里，我们通过以常见的方式在房间内排列物体或随机散布物体来操纵物体及其关系。然后通过保留或移除房间的墙壁来改变房间的空间布局，这是一种典型的布局操作。然后，我们将视觉搜索范式与多元模式分析（MVPA）结合起来，参与者在房间内主动搜索物体。左右 PPA 都对布局属性敏感，但右 PPA 即使在使用关于物体及其关系的信息进行跨分类程序对新刺激时也对物体关系敏感。左 RSC 和右 RSC 对空间布局和物体关系都敏感，但只能使用关于物体关系的信息进行跨分类到新刺激。这些效应仅限于 PPA 和 RSC，因为其他控制大脑区域没有显示出相同的结果模式。我们的研究结果强调了在需要参与者明确检索特定领域过程的范式中的重要性，并表明物体及其关系在场景区域中被处理的程度比以前假设的要大。
