The constructive nature of scene perception and memory

To perceive and remember a continuous visual world from discontinuous, fragmented views, cortical mechanisms actively fill-in missing information. I will report functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence for “filling-out” of scene layout information beyond what was physically presented, an illusion known as boundary extension. Two cortical areas important for scene processing, the parahippocampal cortex and retrosplenial cortex, represented more information than was physically presented. A second study demonstrated that retrosplenial cortex plays a further role in stitching discontinuous views into a continuous, panoramic representation of the local environment. These results indicate that scene layout representations are extrapolated beyond the confines of the perceptual input, providing neural evidence for the constructive nature of scene perception and memory.