After viewing a picture of an environment, our memory of it typically extends beyond what was presented—a phenomenon called boundary extension. But sometimes, memory errors show the opposite pattern—boundary contraction—and the relationship between these phenomena is controversial. We constructed virtual 3D environments, and created a series of views at different distances, from object close-ups to wide-angle indoor views, and tested for memory errors along this object-to-scene continuum. Boundary extension was evident for close-scale views, and transitioned parametrically to boundary contraction for far-scale views. However, this transition point was not tied to a specific position in the environment; instead, it tracked with judgments of the best looking view. We propose that boundary extension and contraction are in fact integrated phenomena, and we offer an account where competition between object-based and scene-based affordances determine whether a view will extend or contract in memory.

While humans experience the visual environment in a panoramic 220-degree view, traditional functional MRI setups are limited to display images like postcards in the central 10-15 deg of the visual field. Thus, it remains unknown how a scene is represented in the brain when perceived across the full visual field. Here, we developed a novel method for ultra-wide angle visual presentation and probed for signatures of immersive scene representation. To accomplish this, we bounced the projected image off angled-mirrors directly onto a custom-built curved screen, creating an unobstructed view of 175 deg. Scene images were created from custom-built virtual environments with a compatible wide field-of-view to avoid perceptual distortion. We found that immersive scene representation drives medial cortex with far-peripheral preferences, but surprisingly had little effect on classic scene regions. That is, scene regions showed relatively minimal modulation over dramatic changes of visual size. Further, we found that scene and face-selective regions maintain their content preferences even under conditions of central scotoma, when only the extreme far-peripheral visual field is stimulated. These results highlight that not all far-peripheral information is automatically integrated into the computations of scene regions, and that there are routes to high-level visual areas that do not require direct stimulation of the central visual field. Broadly, this work provides new clarifying evidence on content vs. peripheral preferences in scene representation, and opens new neuroimaging research avenues to understand immersive visual representation.

We can easily perceive the spatial scale depicted in a picture, regardless of whether it is a small space (e.g., a close-up view of a chair) or a much larger space (e.g., an entire class room). How does the human visual system encode this continuous dimension? Here, we investigated the underlying neural coding of depicted spatial scale, by examining the voxel tuning and topographic organization of brain responses. We created naturalistic yet carefully-controlled stimuli by constructing virtual indoor environments, and rendered a series of snapshots to smoothly sample between a close-up view of the central object and far-scale view of the full environment (object-to-scene continuum). Human brain responses were measured to each position using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We did not find evidence for a smooth topographic mapping for the object-to-scene continuum on the cortex. Instead, we observed large swaths of cortex with opposing ramp-shaped profiles, with highest responses to one end of the object-to-scene continuum or the other, and a small region showing a weak tuning to intermediate scale views. Importantly, when we considered the multi-voxel patterns of the entire ventral occipito-temporal cortex, we found smooth and linear representation of the object-to-scene continuum. Thus, our results together suggest that depicted spatial scale is coded parametrically in large-scale population codes across the entire ventral occipito-temporal cortex.