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Estimating the size of a space and the level of clutter within a space is central to our interactions in scenes, for example when deciding whether or not to take a crowded elevator or how to organize furniture and objects in a room. Interestingly, the size of a space is independent from level of clutter: spatial size is a property defined by the size and shape of the spatial boundary of a scene while clutter is a property defined by the amount of objects within the spatial boundary. Here, we examined how neural areas respond to scenes that parametrically vary in both size and the amount of clutter of depicted space. Using a linear regression model on multivoxel pattern activity across regions of interests, we found that the patterns of activity in the parahippocampal cortex represented both the spatial size and clutter information within a scene, while a retrosplenial cortex selectively represented the spatial size dimension of a scene. Our data suggest that while scene information is represented in a distributed manner across multiple visual areas, spatial size information of a scene is coded independently of the amount of clutter within a scene, consistent with previous results showing complementary but distinct neural representations of spatial boundary and scene content information.
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