Population receptive field size does not correspond to spatial frequency processing in scene-selective cortex.

ABSTRACT: Humans are experts at scene perception, for example, for recognizing familiar places or navigating new spaces. Scene representations in the brain are often thought of as global or large-scale, suggesting that scenes are represented by coarse-grained or holistic features. Recent work has shown that high spatial frequency or fine-grained visual information is also represented within scene-selective areas, which challenges the idea of strictly low-frequency, gist-like representations in those regions. Here, we explore whether these contrasting views can be explained by the size of the population receptive fields (pRFs) within two scene-selective areas: the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and occipital place area (OPA). Our results show that both the PPA and the OPA contain voxels with a vari

SUBMITTER: Leferink CA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12856939 | biostudies-literature | 2026

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature