Dear Users

This afternoon there will be a project proposal presentation given by David Watson. The title of the talk is "How are Scenes Represented in the Brain?".

Please note that the talks will start at the usual time of 4.15 pm but these talks will take place in Psychology in the Venables room (A202).

Please below for the talk abstract.

Best wishes Rebecca

Abstract: Human ventral visual cortex has been noted to contain regions showing selectivity for higher level visual objects categories – including faces, body parts, inanimate objects, and place scenes. A key question in this area is whether such regions may best be regarded as discrete modules with no finer internal structure and not belonging to any wider overarching structure, or whether such regions may exist as points along a wider topographical map of object category.

The current project aims to investigate this question within the context of cortical regions responsive to place scenes. It has been shown that scene images can be categorised along their semantic categories (e.g. cityscape, forest, coastline, etc.) based on their underlying low-level visual properties (Oliva & Torralba, 2001). As such, scene category forms a possible dimension along which scene selective cortical regions could be organised.

Using fMRI, we propose to compare patterns of cortical activity elicited by fixed blocks of natural scene sub-categories (coasts, forests, and mountains) against those elicited by mixed blocks containing all sub-categories. If scene selective regions are found to respond uniformly to all scene categories, this would support a modular-based hypothesis. If, on the hand, these regions are shown to respond heterogeneously to different scene categories, this would suggest the presence of a larger scale topographical map of scene / object category.