Disentangling scene content from spatial boundary: complementary roles for the parahippocampal place area and lateral occipital complex in representing real-world scenes

Behavioral and computational studies suggest that visual scene analysis rapidly produces a rich description of both the objects and the spatial layout of surfaces in a scene. However, there is still a large gap in our understanding of how the human brain accomplishes these diverse functions of scene understanding. Here we probe the nature of real-world scene representations using multivoxel functional magnetic resonance imaging pattern analysis. We show that natural scenes are analyzed in a distributed and complementary manner by the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and the lateral occipital complex (LOC) in particular, as well as other regions in the ventral stream. Specifically, we study the classification performance of different scene-selective regions using images that vary in spatial boundary and naturalness content. We discover that, whereas both the PPA and LOC can accurately classify scenes, they make different errors: the PPA more often confuses scenes that have the same spatial boundaries, whereas the LOC more often confuses scenes that have the same content. By demonstrating that visual scene analysis recruits distinct and complementary high-level representations, our results testify to distinct neural pathways for representing the spatial boundaries and content of a visual scene.