The transverse occipital sulcus and intraparietal sulcus show neural selectivity to object-scene size relationships

Lauren E Welbourne,Barry Giesbrecht,Aditya Jonnalagadda,Miguel P Eckstein

doi:10.1038/s42003-021-02294-9

Lauren E Welbourne, Barry Giesbrecht + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02294-9

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Abstract

To optimize visual search, humans attend to objects with the expected size of the sought target relative to its surrounding scene (object-scene scale consistency). We investigate how the human brain responds to variations in object-scene scale consistency. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging and a voxel-wise feature encoding model to estimate tuning to different object/scene properties. We find that regions involved in scene processing (transverse occipital sulcus) and spatial attention (intraparietal sulcus) have the strongest responsiveness and selectivity to object-scene scale consistency: reduced activity to mis-scaled objects (either unusually smaller or larger). The findings show how and where the brain incorporates object-scene size relationships in the processing of scenes. The response properties of these brain areas might explain why during visual search humans often miss objects that are salient but at atypical sizes relative to the surrounding scene.

Highlights

To optimize visual search, humans attend to objects with the expected size of the sought target relative to its surrounding scene
We investigated activity in functionally-defined scene regions parahippocampal place area (PPA), transverse occipital sulcus (TOS), and retrosplenial cortex, RSC; object region lateral occipital visual area (LO); intraparietal sulcus (IPS), which is involved in spatial attention and eye movements; the fusiform face region fusiform face area (FFA), as a control comparison; and an anatomically-defined early visual area, V1
We assessed whether the normal scale condition produced a greater response than the misscaled conditions. In this first analysis (Fig. 2a), all regions of interest (ROIs), except FFA (p = .561) and V1 (p = .741), showed a reduction in BOLD responses for mis-scaled levels, with a higher general linear models (GLM) beta weight for the normal scale consistency level (p = .001 for LO and RSC, and p < .001 for TOS, PPA, and IPS, all p-values from permutation tests using 1000 permutations, one-tailed, with falsediscovery rate (FDR) correction across ROIs)

Summary

Introduction

Humans attend to objects with the expected size of the sought target relative to its surrounding scene (object-scene scale consistency). The response properties of these brain areas might explain why during visual search humans often miss objects that are salient but at atypical sizes relative to the surrounding scene. The brain rapidly processes information about a scene, including its category (indoor, outdoor, natural, city, etc.10), the configuration of objects[11,12,13,14,15], and highly visible objects that often co-occur with the target[16] This information is used to direct eye movements towards locations expected to contain the searched object[10,11,14,17,18,19]. Little is known about which brain areas are responsive to the spatial scale of an object relative to the surrounding objects in the scene Such brain areas might play an important role in guiding attention during search toward likely target sizes[20]. A comparison across feature weight values allowed separating overall responsiveness of an area to visual information from how selective a voxel was to a single feature rather than broadly tuned to multiple features[34,35,36]

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