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A common neural substrate for processing scenes and egomotion-compatible visual motion.

ABSTRACT: Neuroimaging studies have revealed two separate classes of category-selective regions specialized in optic flow (egomotion-compatible) processing and in scene/place perception. Despite the importance of both optic flow and scene/place recognition to estimate changes in position and orientation within the environment during self-motion, the possible functional link between egomotion- and scene-selective regions has not yet been established. Here we reanalyzed functional magnetic resonance images from a large sample of participants performing two well-known "localizer" fMRI experiments, consisting in passive viewing of navigationally relevant stimuli such as buildings and places (scene/place stimulus) and coherently moving fields of dots simulating the visual stimulation during self-motion (flow fields). After interrogating the egomotion-selective areas with respect to the scene/place stimulus and the scene-selective areas with respect to flow fields, we found that the egomotion-selective areas V6+ and pIPS/V3A responded bilaterally more to scenes/places compared to faces, and all the scene-selective areas (parahippocampal place area or PPA, retrosplenial complex or RSC, and occipital place area or OPA) responded more to egomotion-compatible optic flow compared to random motion. The conjunction analysis between scene/place and flow field stimuli revealed that the most important focus of common activation was found in the dorsolateral parieto-occipital cortex, spanning the scene-selective OPA and the egomotion-selective pIPS/V3A. Individual inspection of the relative locations of these two regions revealed a partial overlap and a similar response profile to an independent low-level visual motion stimulus, suggesting that OPA and pIPS/V3A may be part of a unique motion-selective complex specialized in encoding both egomotion- and scene-relevant information, likely for the control of navigation in a structured environment.

SUBMITTER: Sulpizio V

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7473967 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A common neural substrate for processing scenes and egomotion-compatible visual motion.

Sulpizio Valentina V Galati Gaspare G Fattori Patrizia P Galletti Claudio C Pitzalis Sabrina S

Brain structure & function 20200709 7

Neuroimaging studies have revealed two separate classes of category-selective regions specialized in optic flow (egomotion-compatible) processing and in scene/place perception. Despite the importance of both optic flow and scene/place recognition to estimate changes in position and orientation within the environment during self-motion, the possible functional link between egomotion- and scene-selective regions has not yet been established. Here we reanalyzed functional magnetic resonance images ...[more]

PMID: 32647918

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Project description:Neurons in the dorsal pathway of the visual cortex are thought to be involved in motion processing. The first site of motion processing is the primary visual cortex (V1), encoding the direction of motion in local receptive fields, with higher order motion processing happening in the middle temporal area (MT). Complex motion properties like optic flow are processed in higher cortical areas of the Medial Superior Temporal area (MST). In this study, a hierarchical neural field network model of motion processing is presented. The model architecture has an input layer followed by either one or cascade of two neural fields (NF): the first of these, NF1, represents V1, while the second, NF2, represents MT. A special feature of the model is that lateral connections used in the neural fields are trained by asymmetric Hebbian learning, imparting to the neural field the ability to process sequential information in motion stimuli. The model was trained using various traditional moving patterns such as bars, squares, gratings, plaids, and random dot stimulus. In the case of bar stimuli, the model had only a single NF, the neurons of which developed a direction map of the moving bar stimuli. Training a network with two NFs on moving square and moving plaids stimuli, we show that, while the neurons in NF1 respond to the direction of the component (such as gratings and edges) motion, the neurons in NF2 (analogous to MT) responding to the direction of the pattern (plaids, square object) motion. In the third study, a network with 2 NFs was simulated using random dot stimuli (RDS) with translational motion, and show that the NF2 neurons can encode the direction of the concurrent dot motion (also called translational flow motion), independent of the dot configuration. This translational RDS flow motion is decoded by a simple perceptron network (a layer above NF2) with an accuracy of 100% on train set and 90% on the test set, thereby demonstrating that the proposed network can generalize to new dot configurations. Also, the response properties of the model on different input stimuli closely resembled many of the known features of the neurons found in electrophysiological studies.

Dataset Information

A common neural substrate for processing scenes and egomotion-compatible visual motion.

Publications

A common neural substrate for processing scenes and egomotion-compatible visual motion.

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