Rectilinear Edge Selectivity Is Insufficient to Explain the Category Selectivity of the Parahippocampal Place Area

The parahippocampal place area (PPA) is one of several brain regions that respond more strongly to scenes than to non-scene items such as objects and faces. The mechanism underlying this scene-preferential response remains unclear. One possibility is that the PPA is tuned to low-level stimulus features that are found more often in scenes than in less-preferred stimuli. Supporting this view, Nasr et al. (2014) recently observed that some of the stimuli that are known to strongly activate the PPA contain a large number of rectilinear edges. They further demonstrated that PPA response is modulated by rectilinearity for a range of non-scene images. Motivated by these results, we tested whether rectilinearity suffices to explain PPA selectivity for scenes. In the first experiment, we replicated the previous finding of modulation by rectilinearity in the PPA for arrays of 2-d shapes. However, two further experiments failed to find a rectilinearity effect for faces or scenes: high-rectilinearity faces and scenes did not activate the PPA any more strongly than low-rectilinearity faces and scenes. Moreover, the categorical advantage for scenes vs. faces was maintained in the PPA and two other scene-selective regions—the retrosplenial complex (RSC) and occipital place area (OPA)—when rectilinearity was matched between stimulus sets. We conclude that selectivity for scenes in the PPA cannot be explained by a preference for low-level rectilinear edges.