title: Neural codes of seeing architectural styles.
abstract: Images of iconic buildings, such as the CN Tower, instantly transport us to specific places, such as Toronto. Despite the substantial impact of architectural design on people's visual experience of built environments, we know little about its neural representation in the human brain. In the present study, we have found patterns of neural activity associated with specific architectural styles in several high-level visual brain regions, but not in primary visual cortex (V1). This finding suggests that the neural correlates of the visual perception of architectural styles stem from style-specific complex visual structure beyond the simple features computed in V1. Surprisingly, the network of brain regions representing architectural styles included the fusiform face area (FFA) in addition to several scene-selective regions. Hierarchical clustering of error patterns further revealed that the FFA participated to a much larger extent in the neural encoding of architectural styles than entry-level scene categories. We conclude that the FFA is involved in fine-grained neural encoding of scenes at a subordinate-level, in our case, architectural styles of buildings. This study for the first time shows how the human visual system encodes visual aspects of architecture, one of the predominant and longest-lasting artefacts of human culture.
authors.affiliation: Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, 61801, United States.
authors.forename: Heeyoung
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Choo
authors.affiliation: Department of City and Regional Planning, The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio, 43210, United States.
authors.forename: Jack L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Nasar
authors.affiliation: Department of City and Regional Planning, The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio, 43210, United States.
authors.forename: Bardia
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Nikrahei
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3G3, Canada.
authors.forename: Dirk B
authors.initials: DB
authors.lastname: Walther
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005260:Female; D064368:Healthy Volunteers; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D055815:Young Adult