Deepasri Prasad¹ (), Adam Steel^1,2, Caroline E. Robertson¹; ¹Dartmouth College, ²University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Although prior work proposed that visual recall reactivates visual category-selective brain regions, recent research shows that recalling familiar scenes recruits areas anterior and adjacent to visual scene-selective regions (Steel et al., 2021). Here we examined whether the anterior shift for visual recall vs. perception is unique to scenes, or if this occurs for other visual categories (e.g., faces, bodies, objects) using fMRI. We scanned participants (N=18) performing a visual recall and a visual perception paradigm. Before the visual recall task, participants provided a list of personally familiar faces, places, objects, and body parts (5 examples per category), which they vividly recalled during the scan. During the visual perception task, participants viewed dynamic videos from each category. For both paradigms, we contrasted activity during place-, face-, and body trials against object-activity to identify category-specific activation clusters and intersected this activity with locations of eight functional areas defined from publicly available atlases: parahippocampal (PPA), occipital (OPA) place areas, occipital (OFA) and fusiform face areas (FFA1, FFA2), and extrastriate body area subregions (ITG, LOS, MTG). Scene areas had a higher percentage of significant voxels during recall compared to body and face areas (all p-values ≤ 0.001); these recall activity clusters were larger and more contiguous in scene areas than in other areas. As predicted, all scene areas showed a significant anterior shift in peak activity for recall versus perception (all p-values < 0.001). Crucially, no anterior shift was observed for any face or body areas (all p-values ≥ 0.05). Taken together this suggests that scenes have distinct yet adjacent areas for perception and memory, but other categories do not. The unique anterior shift for scenes may reflect the need to represent contextual information outside the current field of view during navigation.

Acknowledgements: NSF Career Award 2144700