Perception of built environments and its neural modulation by the behavioral goals of the perceiver.

Objective: This study examines the neural activity patterns to scenes from built environment categories and their modulation by behavioral tasks, addressing several gaps in the literature with an interdisciplinary approach. We study the often-overlooked built environments where we spend most of our time, use a principled categorization method from the architecture literature, employ multiple behavioral tasks, and apply various analysis techniques. Methods: FMRI data were collected from 23 participants (12 females) as they viewed scenes and performed two tasks. Scene categories were architectural elements and functional facilities common to all public environments. Architectural elements consisted of areas that allow us to access (entrances-exits) and circulate within (stairs, corridors, etc.) buildings. Functional facilities consisted of places that serve human needs (restrooms, eating, and seating areas). Behavioral tasks consisted of a categorization task where participants decided which of the two main categories the presented stimulus belongs, and an approach-avoidance task which aims to measure initial processing regarding a scene with subjective enter-or-not decisions. Further, we conducted a localizer session to define scene-selective regions of interest (ROIs): parahippocampal place area (PPA), retrosplenial cortex (RSC), and occipital place area (OPA). Results: Univariate whole-brain analyses did not reveal significant differences between the tasks. Searchlight-based MVPA revealed that not tasks but categories are decoded at the wholebrain level at the lingual and parahippocampal gyri, the supplementary motor area, and the occipital cortex. Further, we performed a model-based representational similarity analysis (RSA) to examine neural modulations in the scene-selective regions. Comparing task, category, and visual similarity models to neural activity patterns in these regions, RSA demonstrated that scene-selective regions were strongly correlated with the task model only. Conclusion: Results indicate that neural responses to built environments are modulated by scene category at the wholebrain level and task at the ROI level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]