Fig. 3: The place-memory areas respond preferentially to familiar stimuli .
From: A network linking scene perception and spatial memory systems in posterior cerebral cortex
a, b The place-memory areas preferentially activate familiar stimuli. a. Experiment 3. Participants viewed viewing panning movies of personally familiar places versus unfamiliar places, tailored to each participant using Google StreetView (see Supplementary Videos 2–5). The cortical surface depicts the contrast of BOLD activity for a single participant, thresholded at vertex-wise p < 0.001. Only significant vertices within the scene perception (white) and place-memory (burgundy) areas are shown. b Average t-statistic of vertices in the scene-perception (open bars) and place-memory areas (filled bars) when viewing videos of personally familiar places compared to unfamiliar places. On each cortical surface, the place-memory areas showed an enhanced response to familiar stimuli compared to the scene-perception areas (all ts > 2.6, ps < 0.01). Connected points depict individual participants. The hippocampus also showed a preferential response to familiar compared to unfamiliar place movies (Supplementary Fig. 9a). The amygdala (Supplementary Fig. 9b) and early visual cortex (Supplementary Fig. 10) did not show a preferential response to familiar place movies, arguing against a purely attentional account of this effect. OPA—occipital place area, LPMA—lateral place-memory area, PPA—parahippocampal place area, VPMA—ventral place-memory area, MPA—medial place area, MPMA—medial place-memory area.
