Modality-independent coding of scene categories in prefrontal cortex
| Autor: | Yaelan Jung, Dirk B. Walther, Bart Larsen |
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| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: |
Adult
Male 0301 basic medicine Adolescent genetic structures Brain activity and meditation Prefrontal Cortex Sensory system Stimulus (physiology) Young Adult 03 medical and health sciences Neural activity 0302 clinical medicine Stimulus modality Humans Active listening Prefrontal cortex Research Articles 030304 developmental biology Brain Mapping 0303 health sciences Modality (human–computer interaction) General Neuroscience Magnetic Resonance Imaging 030104 developmental biology Acoustic Stimulation Categorization Female Perception Psychology Neuroscience Photic Stimulation psychological phenomena and processes 030217 neurology & neurosurgery Coding (social sciences) Cognitive psychology |
| Popis: | Natural environments convey information through multiple sensory modalities, all of which contribute to people’s percepts. Although it has been shown that visual or auditory content of scene categories can be decoded from brain activity, it remains unclear where and how humans integrate different sensory inputs and represent scene information beyond a specific sensory modality domain. To address this question, we investigated how categories of scene images and sounds are represented in several brain regions. A mixed gender group of healthy human subjects participated the present study, where their brain activity was measured with fMRI while viewing images or listening to sounds of different places. We found that both visual and auditory scene categories can be decoded not only from modality-specific areas, but also from several brain regions in the temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortex. Intriguingly, only in the prefrontal cortex, but not in any other regions, categories of scene images and sounds appear to be represented in similar activation patterns, suggesting that scene representations in the prefrontal cortex are modality-independent. Furthermore, the error patterns of neural decoders indicate that category-specific neural activity patterns in the middle and superior frontal gyri are tightly linked to categorization behavior. Our findings demonstrate that complex scene information is represented at an abstract level in the prefrontal cortex, regardless of the sensory modality of the stimulus.Statement of SignificanceOur experience in daily life requires the integration of multiple sensory inputs such as images, sounds, or scents from the environment. Here, for the first time, we investigated where and how in the brain information about the natural environment from multiple senses is merged to form modality-independent representations of scene categories. We show direct decoding of scene categories across sensory modalities from patterns of neural activity in the prefrontal cortex. We also conclusively tie these neural representations to human categorization behavior based on the errors from the neural decoder and behavior. Our findings suggest that the prefrontal cortex is a central hub for integrating sensory information and computing modality-independent representations of scene categories. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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