Coherent natural scene structure facilitates the extraction of task-relevant object information in visual cortex.

ABSTRACT: Looking for objects within complex natural environments is a task everybody performs multiple times each day. In this study, we explore how the brain uses the typical composition of real-world environments to efficiently solve this task. We recorded fMRI activity while participants performed two different categorization tasks on natural scenes. In the object task, they indicated whether the scene contained a person or a car, while in the scene task, they indicated whether the scene depicted an urban or a rural environment. Critically, each scene was presented in an "intact" way, preserving its coherent structure, or in a "jumbled" way, with information swapped across quadrants. In both tasks, participants' categorization was more accurate and faster for intact scenes. These behavioral bene

SUBMITTER: Kaiser D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8456750 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature