bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/044156; this version posted March 16, 2016. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. Contour junctions underlie neural representations of scene categories in high-level human visual cortex Contour junctions underlie neural code of scenes Heeyoung Choo1, & Dirk. B. Walther1 1Department of Psychology, University of Toronto 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G3 Canada Correspondence should be addressed to Heeyoung Choo, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G3 Canada. Phone: +1-416-946-3200 Email:
[email protected] Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/044156; this version posted March 16, 2016. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. 1 Abstract 2 3 Humans efficiently grasp complex visual environments, making highly consistent judgments of entry- 4 level category despite their high variability in visual appearance. How does the human brain arrive at the 5 invariant neural representations underlying categorization of real-world environments? We here show that 6 the neural representation of visual environments in scenes-selective human visual cortex relies on statistics 7 of contour junctions, which provide cues for the three-dimensional arrangement of surfaces in a scene.