The temporo-parietal junction contributes to global gestalt perception—evidence from studies in chess experts

Abstract

In a recent neuroimaging study the comparison of intact vs. disturbed perception of global gestalt indicated a significant role of the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) in the intact perception of global gestalt (Huberle and Karnath, 2012). This location corresponded well with the areas known to be damaged or impaired in patients with simultanagnosia after stroke or due to neurodegenerative diseases. It was concluded that the TPJ plays an important role in the integration of individual items to a holistic percept. Thus, increased BOLD signals should be found in this region whenever a task calls for the integration of multiple visual items. Behavioral experiments in chess experts suggested that their superior skills in comparison to chess novices are partly based on fast holistic processing of chess positions with multiple pieces. We thus analyzed BOLD data from four fMRI studies that compared chess experts with chess novices during the presentation of complex chess-related visual stimuli (Bilalić et al., 2010, 2011a,b, 2012). Three regions of interests were defined by significant TPJ clusters in the abovementioned study of global gestalt perception (Huberle and Karnath, 2012) and BOLD signal amplitudes in these regions were compared between chess experts and novices. These cross-paradigm ROI analyses revealed higher signals at the TPJ in chess experts in comparison to novices during presentations of complex chess positions. This difference was consistent across the different tasks in five independent experiments. Our results confirm the assumption that the TPJ region identified in previous work on global gestalt perception plays an important role in the processing of complex visual stimulus configurations.

The neural correlates of theory of mind and their role during empathy and the game of chess: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

“…The present study did not include hours of chess study within the calculation of chess expertise due to the age range of this small sample and secondly, because chess players were novice chess players who did not engage in serious study of the game. The fact that only novice chess players were used in the present study could have implications for our results, as neuroimaging results show that chess experts compared to novices present increased neuronal activation in the ventral visual system, TPJ, posterior cingulate gyrus, and orbitofrontal cortex (Atherton et al, 2003;Bilalic´et al, 2010Bilalic´et al, , 2011aBilalic´et al, ,b, 2012Krawczyk et al, 2011;Rennig et al, 2013). Such differences in neuronal activity could be explained by differences in the strategies employed between chess novices and experts when playing the game of chess.…”

Interference between face and non-face domains of perceptual expertise: a replication and extension

“…For example, greater FFA activation was found in response to chess stimuli among chess experts when the structure of the chess stimuli was distorted compared to intact ( Bilalić et al, 2011 ). Further, recent findings suggest that disrupted objects of expertise, such as the transformed cars used here, may trigger a search for structure or meaningful chunks by experts that appears to also involve a frontal-parietal network ( Bartlett et al, 2013 ; Rennig et al, 2013 ; see also Bor and Owen, 2007 ). These existing findings, and the frequency with which transformed objects of experts (inverted, scrambled, misaligned etc.)…”

Spatial Arrangement and Set Size Influence the Coding of Non-symbolic Quantities in the Intraparietal Sulcus

“…However, for random arrangements in the estimation range this mechanism may not be effective. Further fMRI studies are needed to revisit the question whether pattern recognition or a similar cognitive process (e.g., Gestalt perception, Wertheimer, 1923 ; Rennig et al, 2013 ) may explain why the IPS response is sensitive to the arrangement of dots during enumeration. Furthermore, it needs to be evaluated whether pattern recognition mechanisms can adequately explain the distinctive neural responses when processing small as compared to large visual arrays.…”