The transverse occipital sulcus and intraparietal sulcus show neural selectivity to object-scene size relationships

Abstract

Lauren Welbourne et al. use functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the neural dynamics linked to how humans process object size in the environment. After showing participants a series of images with appropriately-sized or misscaled objects (such as a giant toothbrush on a bathroom sink), the authors observed that the temporal occipital sulcus and intraparietal sulcus were strongly responsive to normally-sized, but not misscaled, objects, suggesting that object representations in both brain regions incorporate the objects’ typical size relationships to the surrounding scene.