Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 114, Issue 18, Pages 4793-4798Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1618228114
Keywords
scene-selective visual cortex; occipital place area; affordances; navigation; dorsal stream
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Funding
- NEI NIH HHS [R01 EY022350] Funding Source: Medline
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A central component of spatial navigation is determining where one can and cannot go in the immediate environment. We used fMRI to test the hypothesis that the human visual system solves this problem by automatically identifying the navigational affordances of the local scene. Multivoxel pattern analyses showed that a scene-selective region of dorsal occipitoparietal cortex, known as the occipital place area, represents pathways for movement in scenes in a manner that is tolerant to variability in other visual features. These effects were found in two experiments: One using tightly controlled artificial environments as stimuli, the other using a diverse set of complex, natural scenes. A reconstruction analysis demonstrated that the population codes of the occipital place area could be used to predict the affordances of novel scenes. Taken together, these results reveal a previously unknown mechanism for perceiving the affordance structure of navigable space.
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