Dataset Information

Natural scene statistics account for the representation of scene categories in human visual cortex.

ABSTRACT: During natural vision, humans categorize the scenes they encounter: an office, the beach, and so on. These categories are informed by knowledge of the way that objects co-occur in natural scenes. How does the human brain aggregate information about objects to represent scene categories? To explore this issue, we used statistical learning methods to learn categories that objectively capture the co-occurrence statistics of objects in a large collection of natural scenes. Using the learned categories, we modeled fMRI brain signals evoked in human subjects when viewing images of scenes. We find that evoked activity across much of anterior visual cortex is explained by the learned categories. Furthermore, a decoder based on these scene categories accurately predicts the categories and objects comprising novel scenes from brain activity evoked by those scenes. These results suggest that the human brain represents scene categories that capture the co-occurrence statistics of objects in the world.

SUBMITTER: Stansbury DE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5464350 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Natural scene statistics account for the representation of scene categories in human visual cortex.

Stansbury Dustin E DE Naselaris Thomas T Gallant Jack L JL

Neuron 20130808 5

During natural vision, humans categorize the scenes they encounter: an office, the beach, and so on. These categories are informed by knowledge of the way that objects co-occur in natural scenes. How does the human brain aggregate information about objects to represent scene categories? To explore this issue, we used statistical learning methods to learn categories that objectively capture the co-occurrence statistics of objects in a large collection of natural scenes. Using the learned categori ...[more]

PMID: 23932491

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Project description:Natural environments convey information through multiple sensory modalities, all of which contribute to people's percepts. Although it has been shown that visual or auditory content of scene categories can be decoded from brain activity, it remains unclear how humans represent scene information beyond a specific sensory modality domain. To address this question, we investigated how categories of scene images and sounds are represented in several brain regions. A group of healthy human subjects (both sexes) participated in the present study, where their brain activity was measured with fMRI while viewing images or listening to sounds of different real-world environments. We found that both visual and auditory scene categories can be decoded not only from modality-specific areas, but also from several brain regions in the temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortex (PFC). Intriguingly, only in the PFC, but not in any other regions, categories of scene images and sounds appear to be represented in similar activation patterns, suggesting that scene representations in PFC are modality-independent. Furthermore, the error patterns of neural decoders indicate that category-specific neural activity patterns in the middle and superior frontal gyri are tightly linked to categorization behavior. Our findings demonstrate that complex scene information is represented at an abstract level in the PFC, regardless of the sensory modality of the stimulus.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Our experience in daily life includes multiple sensory inputs, such as images, sounds, or scents from the surroundings, which all contribute to our understanding of the environment. Here, for the first time, we investigated where and how in the brain information about the natural environment from multiple senses is merged to form modality-independent representations of scene categories. We show direct decoding of scene categories across sensory modalities from patterns of neural activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). We also conclusively tie these neural representations to human categorization behavior by comparing patterns of errors between a neural decoder and behavior. Our findings suggest that PFC is a central hub for integrating sensory information and computing modality-independent representations of scene categories.

Dataset Information

Natural scene statistics account for the representation of scene categories in human visual cortex.

Publications

Natural scene statistics account for the representation of scene categories in human visual cortex.

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