Images of iconic buildings, such as the CN Tower, instantly transport us to specific places, such as Toronto. Despite the substantial impact of architectural design on people’s visual experience of built environments, we know little about its neural representation in the human brain. In the present study, we have found patterns of neural activity associated with specific architectural styles in several high-level visual brain regions, but not in primary visual cortex (V1). This finding suggests that the neural correlates of the visual perception of architectural styles stem from style-specific complex visual structure beyond the simple features computed in V1. Surprisingly, the network of brain regions representing architectural styles included the fusiform face area (FFA) in addition to several scene-selective regions. Hierarchical clustering of error patterns further revealed that the FFA participated to a much larger extent in the neural encoding of architectural styles than entry-level scene categories. We conclude that the FFA is involved in fine-grained neural encoding of scenes at a subordinate-level, in our case, architectural styles of buildings. This study for the first time shows how the human visual system encodes visual aspects of architecture, one of the predominant and longest-lasting artefacts of human culture.
Images of iconic buildings, such as the CN Tower, instantly transport us to specific places, such as Toronto. Despite the substantial impact of architectural design on people's visual experience of built environments, we know little about its neural representation in the human brain. In the present study, we have found patterns of neural activity associated with specific architectural styles in several highlevel visual brain regions, but not in primary visual cortex (V1). This finding suggests that the neural correlates of the visual perception of architectural styles stem from style-specific complex visual structure beyond the simple features computed in V1. Surprisingly, the network of brain regions representing architectural styles included the fusiform face area (FFA) in addition to several sceneselective regions. Hierarchical clustering of error patterns further revealed that the FFA participated to a much larger extent in the neural encoding of architectural styles than entry-level scene categories. We conclude that the FFA is involved in fine-grained neural encoding of scenes at a subordinate-level, in our case, architectural styles of buildings. This study for the first time shows how the human visual system encodes visual aspects of architecture, one of the predominant and longest-lasting artefacts of human culture.As of 2014, more than half of the world's population resided in urban environments 1 . Architectural design has profound impact on people's preferences and productivity in such built environments 2,3 . Despite the ubiquity and importance of architecture for people's lives, it is so far unknown where and how architectural styles are represented in people's brains. While appraisal of architectural design is a collective experience encompassing perceptual, cognitive, and emotional experiences, architecture takes essentially a visual form 2 . That is, even though people have different cognitive interpretations and emotional responses to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, they are likely to agree that the building exhibits an unusual asymmetric shape composed of metallic exterior surfaces with high curvature (shown in Fig. 1C. Gehry). Here we show that the perceptual basis of architectural styles is represented in distributed patterns of neural activity in several visually active brain regions in ventral temporal cortex, but not in primary visual cortex.In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, 23 students in their final year at The Ohio State University (11 majoring in architecture, 12 majoring in psychology or neuroscience, one psychology student excluded due to excessive head motion) viewed blocks of images while performing a one-back task. Each block comprised four images from one of the following sixteen categories; (1) representative buildings of four architectural styles (Byzantine, Renaissance, Modern, and Deconstructive); (2) representative buildings designed by four famous architects of Modern and Deconstructive styles (Le Corbusier, Antoni Gaudi, Frank Gehry, ...
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