Places in the brain: Converging neural, behavioral, and developmental evidence for multiple systems in human visual scene processing

项目总结 人类快速识别当地视觉环境或场景的能力构成了许多人的基础 我们日常生活中必不可少的行为。简而言之，我们从场景中提取了丰富的信息，如 作为场景的类别(例如，“城市”)、其身份(例如，“亚特兰大”)，以及其他关键属性 它是否安全，或者什么行为适合当前上下文。几乎同时，我们还 提取对导航至关重要的信息，使我们能够在当地的视觉环境中找到我们的路 完美无缺、毫不费力，不撞墙、不绊倒障碍物。更重要的是，我们立即 在更广泛的空间地图中实现本地视觉环境，例如，允许我们找到我们的方式 从镇上另一个地方最新开的餐厅回家。但我们如何实现这些非凡的成就呢？ 壮举？试图理解人类视觉场景处理的一个有希望的策略是表征 完成这一任务的神经系统。因此，这项研究的长期目标是了解 参与人类视觉场景处理的神经机制，从童年到成年，在健康和 疾病。过去二十年的认知神经科学揭示了一组由三个皮质区域组成的 共同构成人类视觉场景处理系统：海马区旁(PPA)、 脾后复合体(RSC)和枕骨区(OPA)。然而，除了建立将军 这些区域在场景知觉中的参与(即，对场景的图像比对图像的反应更多 人类神经成像实验中的日常物体或面部)，三个基本但尚未回答的问题 问题依然存在。首先，每个区域在成人视觉场景处理中的确切功能是什么？ 每个区域是否在人类视觉场景处理的所有元素中发挥作用(即，场景分类， 视觉导航和地图导航，如上所述)，或者取而代之的是每一个都有它的 有自己独特的功能吗？第二，在神经学的侮辱下，这个功能组织是如何崩溃的？ 第三，它是如何在开发过程中连接起来的？本研究旨在解决这三个问题 使用各种方法和参与者群体，包括功能磁共振成像 健康成人、健康儿童和威廉姆斯综合征患者(A)的功能磁共振成像和心理物理学 以及健康成年人的经颅磁刺激(TMS)。了解人类 视觉场景处理及其在健康和疾病中的发展不仅具有固有的科学价值， 但也可能有一天被利用来帮助那些毁灭性地失去识别能力的人 他们的环境，并在其中导航，作为眼病、脑部手术、中风、 神经退行性疾病，或发育障碍。

PROJECT SUMMARY The human ability to rapidly recognize the local visual environment, or “scene”, forms the bedrock for many of our essential, everyday behaviors. In a brief glance, we extract a wealth of information from scenes, such as the category of the scene (e.g., “a city”), its identity (e.g., “Atlanta”), and other critical properties like whether it is safe or what behavior is appropriate for the current context. Almost simultaneously, we also extract information that is vital for navigation, allowing us to find our way through the local visual environment flawlessly and effortlessly, not running into walls or tripping over obstacles. What’s more, we immediately realize the local visual environment within a broader spatial map, allowing us, for example, to find our way home from the newest restaurant in another part of town. But how do we accomplish these remarkable feats? One promising strategy for attempting to understand human visual scene processing is to characterize the neural system that accomplishes it. Thus, the long-term objective of this research is to understand the neural mechanisms involved in human visual scene processing, from childhood to adulthood, in health and disease. Cognitive neuroscience of the past two decades has revealed a set of three cortical regions that together make up the human visual scene processing system: the parahippocampal place area (PPA), the retrosplenial complex (RSC), and the occipital place area (OPA). However, beyond establishing the general involvement of these regions in scene perception (i.e., responding more to images of scenes than to images of everyday objects or faces in human neuroimaging experiments), three fundamental and yet unanswered questions remain. First, what is the precise function of each region in adult human visual scene processing? Is each region playing a part in all the elements of human visual scene processing (i.e., scene categorization, visually-guided navigation, and map-guided navigation, as described above), or instead does each have its own distinct function? Second, how does this functional organization breakdown under neurological insult? And third, how does it get wired up in development? This research will aim to address these three questions using a variety of methods and participant populations, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and psychophysics in healthy adults, healthy children, and individuals with Williams syndrome (a genetic disorder), as well as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in healthy adults. Understanding human visual scene processing and its development, in health and disease, is not only of inherent scientific interest, but also may someday be harnessed to help those individuals who devastatingly lose the ability to recognize their environment and navigate through it, as a result of eye diseases, brain surgery, stroke, neurodegenerative diseases, or developmental disorders.