Abstract
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.
Highlights
Images of iconic buildings, such as the CN Tower, instantly transport us to specific places, such as Toronto
We have found patterns of neural activity associated with specific architectural styles in several highlevel visual brain regions, but not in primary visual cortex (V1)
It was possible to decode buildings by famous architects from brain activity in the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and the occipital place area (OPA), but not from V1, the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), the lateral occipital complex (LOC), or the fusiform face area (FFA) (Fig. 2C)
Summary
Heeyoung Choo[1], Jack L. We have found patterns of neural activity associated with specific architectural styles in several highlevel visual brain regions, but not in primary visual cortex (V1). 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 show that the perceptual basis of architectural styles is represented in distributed patterns of neural activity in several visually active brain regions in ventral temporal cortex, but not in primary visual cortex. Each block comprised four images from one of the following sixteen categories; (1) representative buildings of four architectural styles (Byzantine, Renaissance, Modern, and Deconstructive); (2) representative buildings designed by four famous architects of Modern and Deconstructive styles (Le Corbusier, Antoni Gaudi, Frank Gehry, and Frank Lloyd-Wright); (3) four entry-level scene categories (mountains, pastures, highways, and playgrounds); and (4) photographs of faces of four different non-famous men (Fig. 1). Accuracy was compared to chance (25%) at the group level using one-tailed t tests
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