Given that the only unifying property between the permanent items was this high level feature, it is perhaps surprising that the magnitude of classifier accuracy was so great, being very significantly above the level of chance. This reinforces the functional importance of the representation of permanence, and underscores the selective response of the RSC to this item feature. PI3K targets Subjects were also instructed not to link the items that comprised an array together into a scene, and confirmed in post-scan ratings they had not
done so, rather they had viewed them as separate entities. This, along with the finding of the RSC responding specifically to the number of permanent items, Ibrutinib does not fit easily with the idea that RSC (and PHC) processes the three dimensional geometric structure of scenes (Epstein, 2008, Epstein and Ward, 2010, Henderson et al., 2008 and Henderson et al., 2011) or that RSC contains
no information about objects (Harel, Kravitz, & Baker, 2012). Our results are more consistent with a proposal from MacEvoy and Epstein (2011) that a unified representation of whole scenes arises from parallel processing of individual objects within them. Here, we provide further evidence for the simultaneous processing of multiple items, but extend this by identifying a mechanism whereby the properties of local items within a space are key (Mullally and Maguire, 2011), with their permanence seeming to be particularly important. The increased activity in RSC in response to scenes with an explicit three dimensional structure that have been reported frequently in the literature could reflect the presence of multiple permanent items within them. This accords with our previous proposal (Auger et al., 2012) that the RSC’s contribution may be to provide input regarding permanent items upon which other brain areas (e.g., the hippocampus) can then build effective spatial and scene
representations that are central to episodic memories, PRKACG imagining the future and spatial navigation (Hassabis and Maguire, 2007, Maguire and Mullally, 2013, Ranganath and Ritchey, 2012 and Schacter et al., 2012). The specific nature of RSC input was unclear. Our demonstration here that RSC represents every individual permanent item that is in view, shows that the information it represents and makes available is detailed and precise. It is particularly interesting that the information available in the multi-voxel activity patterns in RSC related significantly to the efficacy of participants’ spatial navigation. We previously found poor navigators to be less reliable at characterising permanent, ‘never moving’, items compared to good navigators, and also to have reduced responses in RSC when viewing permanent items in isolation (Auger et al., 2012).