Differential parahippocampal and retrosplenial involvement in three types of visual scene recognition

Human observers can quickly and accurately interpret the meaning of complex visual scenes. The neural mechanisms underlying this ability are largely unexplored. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure cortical activity while subjects identified briefly presented scenes as specific familiar locations (‘‘Houston Hall’’), general place categories (‘‘kitchen’’), or general situational categories (‘‘party’’). Scene-responsive voxels in the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and retrosplenial cortex (RSC) were highly sensitive to recognition level when identifying scenes, responding more strongly during location identification than durin