TY - JOUR
T1 - Representation of gravity-aligned scene structure in ventral pathway visual cortex
AU - Vaziri, Siavash
AU - Connor, Charles E.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank William Nash, William Quinlan, Lei Hao, and Virginia Weeks for technical assistance. This work was supported by NIH grant no. EY024028 . All animal procedures were approved by the Johns Hopkins Animal Care and Use Committee and conformed to US NIH and US Department of Agriculture guidelines.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/3/21
Y1 - 2016/3/21
N2 - The ventral visual pathway in humans and non-human primates is known to represent object information, including shape and identity [1]. Here, we show the ventral pathway also represents scene structure aligned with the gravitational reference frame in which objects move and interact. We analyzed shape tuning of recently described macaque monkey ventral pathway neurons that prefer scene-like stimuli to objects [2]. Individual neurons did not respond to a single shape class, but to a variety of scene elements that are typically aligned with gravity: large planes in the orientation range of ground surfaces under natural viewing conditions, planes in the orientation range of ceilings, and extended convex and concave edges in the orientation range of wall/floor/ceiling junctions. For a given neuron, these elements tended to share a common alignment in eye-centered coordinates. Thus, each neuron integrated information about multiple gravity-aligned structures as they would be seen from a specific eye and head orientation. This eclectic coding strategy provides only ambiguous information about individual structures but explicit information about the environmental reference frame and the orientation of gravity in egocentric coordinates. In the ventral pathway, this could support perceiving and/or predicting physical events involving objects subject to gravity, recognizing object attributes like animacy based on movement not caused by gravity, and/or stabilizing perception of the world against changes in head orientation [3-5]. Our results, like the recent discovery of object weight representation [6], imply that the ventral pathway is involved not just in recognition, but also in physical understanding of objects and scenes.
AB - The ventral visual pathway in humans and non-human primates is known to represent object information, including shape and identity [1]. Here, we show the ventral pathway also represents scene structure aligned with the gravitational reference frame in which objects move and interact. We analyzed shape tuning of recently described macaque monkey ventral pathway neurons that prefer scene-like stimuli to objects [2]. Individual neurons did not respond to a single shape class, but to a variety of scene elements that are typically aligned with gravity: large planes in the orientation range of ground surfaces under natural viewing conditions, planes in the orientation range of ceilings, and extended convex and concave edges in the orientation range of wall/floor/ceiling junctions. For a given neuron, these elements tended to share a common alignment in eye-centered coordinates. Thus, each neuron integrated information about multiple gravity-aligned structures as they would be seen from a specific eye and head orientation. This eclectic coding strategy provides only ambiguous information about individual structures but explicit information about the environmental reference frame and the orientation of gravity in egocentric coordinates. In the ventral pathway, this could support perceiving and/or predicting physical events involving objects subject to gravity, recognizing object attributes like animacy based on movement not caused by gravity, and/or stabilizing perception of the world against changes in head orientation [3-5]. Our results, like the recent discovery of object weight representation [6], imply that the ventral pathway is involved not just in recognition, but also in physical understanding of objects and scenes.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cub.2016.01.022
DO - 10.1016/j.cub.2016.01.022
M3 - Article
C2 - 26923785
AN - SCOPUS:84959134618
SN - 0960-9822
VL - 26
SP - 766
EP - 774
JO - Current Biology
JF - Current Biology
IS - 6
ER -