A neural mechanism for contextualizing fragmented inputs during naturalistic vision

Abstract
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Abstract

With every glimpse of our eyes, we sample only a small and incomplete fragment of the visual world, which needs to be contextualized and integrated into a coherent scene representation. Here we show that the visual system achieves this contextualization by exploiting spatial schemata, that is our knowledge about the composition of natural scenes. We measured fMRI and EEG responses to incomplete scene fragments and used representational similarity analysis to reconstruct their cortical representations in space and time. We observed a sorting of representations according to the fragments' place within the scene schema, which occurred during perceptual analysis in the occipital place area and within the first 200ms of vision. This schema-based coding operates flexibly across visual features (as measured by a deep neural network model) and different types of environments (indoor and outdoor scenes). This flexibility highlights the mechanism's ability to efficiently organize incoming information under dynamic real-world conditions.

Data availability

Data are publicly available on OSF (http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/H3G6V), as indicated in the Materials and Methods section of the manuscript.

The following data sets were generated

(2019) A neural mechanism for contextualizing fragmented information during naturalistic vision
Open Science Framwork, 10.17605/OSF.IO/H3G6V.

http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/H3G6V

Article and author information

Author details

Daniel Kaiser

Department of Psychology, University of York, York, United Kingdom

For correspondence
danielkaiser.net@gmail.com

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-9007-3160
Jacopo Turini

Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Radoslaw M Cichy

Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (KA4683/2-1)

Daniel Kaiser

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (CI241/1-1)

Radoslaw M Cichy

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (CI241/3-1)

Radoslaw M Cichy

H2020 European Research Council (ERC-2018-StG 803370)

Radoslaw M Cichy

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: All participants provided informed written consent. All procedures were approved by the ethical committee of the Department of Education and Psychology at Freie Universität Berlin (reference 140/2017) and were in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.