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Functional brain imaging and population-level visits to urban spaces

Nature Cities volume 1, pages 880–887 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Urbanization is increasing worldwide, and neuroscience research can be conducted to better understand our behavior within, and the effects of, urban environments. In line with this, we conducted a neuroimaging study to ascertain whether brain activity in a small sample of individuals can predict population-level visits around an urban space—in our case, Lisbon, Portugal. We used the density of photographs around Lisbon as a proxy measure of these visits, obtaining 160 geotagged images from the social media platform Flickr to use as stimuli. Participants in the USA who had never visited Lisbon viewed these images while we recorded their brain activity. We found that activity within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex predicted the density of photographs around Lisbon, and hence, population-level visits. Our results highlight the role of reward-related brain regions in shaping human behavior within urban environments and can aid in designing cities that promote sustainable living.

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Fig. 1: Brain regions related to cell image density and participant preference ratings.
Fig. 2: Urban environment fMRI task.

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Data availability

The stimulus set used in this study is available publicly at the open science framework (OSF) repository (https://osf.io/c79w5/). The neuroimaging data for this study are currently available from the corresponding author upon request and will eventually be made public at eMOTIONAL Cities Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) (https://emotional.byteroad.net/collections/ec_catalog/items/fmri_raw_data_wp5_brain_as_predictor).

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Acknowledgements

This work is a part of the eMOTIONAL Cities project, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement number 945307. We acknowledge the use of the MRI facility at Michigan State University and extend our thanks to D. Zhu and J. Irwin for their guidance on MRI protocols and support in data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Advertising and Public Relations, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Ardaman Kaur, Sarah Hoogstraten & Dar Meshi

  2. Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Ardaman Kaur

  3. Centre of Geographical Studies, Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    André Leite Rodrigues

  4. Institute of Physiology, Lisbon School of Medicine, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Diego Andrés Blanco-Mora & Bruno Miranda

  5. Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Bruno Miranda

  6. Centre of Geographical Studies, Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon, Associate Laboratory TERRA, Lisbon, Portugal

    Paulo Morgado

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Contributions

A.K. contributed to the conception and design of the study, data acquisition, data interpretation and analysis, wrote the original draft and revised the manuscript. A.L.R., S.H. and D.A.B.-M. contributed to giving feedback and revising the manuscript. B.M. contributed to the conception and design of the study, secured funding, wrote and edited the manuscript. P.M. conceptualized and supervised the study’s design, secured funding, wrote and edited the manuscript. D.M. conceptualized and supervised the study’s design, secured funding, data interpretation and analysis, wrote and edited the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dar Meshi.

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Nature Cities thanks Brian Knutson, Andrew Mondschein and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Kaur, A., Rodrigues, A.L., Hoogstraten, S. et al. Functional brain imaging and population-level visits to urban spaces. Nat Cities 1, 880–887 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00158-x

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