Training in the Categorization of Aerial and Terrestrial Scenes Differentially Impacts Scene-Selective and Nonscene-Selective Regions in Occipitotemporal Cortex.

Humans are extremely adept at categorizing complex visual environments, an ability supported by a network of scene-selective cortical areas in occipitotemporal cortex (OTC), primarily parahippocampal- and occipital-place area (PPA, OPA, respectively). Despite increasing knowledge on the development of the scene-selective network, it is still not well-understood how experience impacts scene-related activity in the adult brain. A key question is how activity in scene-selective cortex changes as people gain experience in categorizing scenes. To address this question, we conducted an fMRI training study focused on the categorization of aerial and terrestrial scenes. Unlike terrestrial scenes, aerial scenes lack the same environmental regularities the brain has adapted to, and thus ideal for testing the impact of experience on scene-selective cortex. Over six training sessions, 39 participants (19 males and 20 females) were shown scenes of different categories from aerial and terrestrial viewpoints, with half the participants categorizing the scenes at a specific level (e.g., truss bridge/suspension bridge), whereas the other performed an unrelated task on the same images. Both groups were scanned before, during, and after training. We found that categorization training had a group-specific effect on responses in OPA and PPA, with greater neural sensitivity to viewpoint in the trained versus the untrained group. In contrast, nonscene-selective regions, such as object-selective LOC and early visual cortex showed no training effects. Improvements in behavioral performance, including learning transfer, were linked to changes in PPA activity level pre- versus-posttraining. We conclude that scene-selective cortex can support the learning of novel spatial geometries.