Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 50, Issue 2, 1 April 2010, Pages 742-752
NeuroImage

Hippocampal contributions to the processing of architectural ranking

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.12.078Get rights and content

Abstract

Theories of rhetoric and architecture suggest that buildings designed to be high ranking according to the Western architectural decorum have more impact on the minds of their beholders than low-ranking buildings. Here, we used event-related potentials in a visual object categorization task to probe this assumption and to examine whether the hippocampus contributes to the processing of architectural ranking. We found that early negative potentials between 200 and 400 ms differentiated between high- and low-ranking buildings in healthy subjects and patients with temporal lobe epilepsy with and without hippocampal sclerosis. By contrast, late positive potentials between 400 and 600 ms were higher in amplitude to high-ranking buildings only in healthy subjects and TLE patients without but not in TLE patients with hippocampal sclerosis. These findings suggest that the differentiation between high- and low-ranking buildings entails both early visual object selection and late post-model selection processes and that the hippocampus proper contributes critically to this second stage of visual object categorization.

Section snippets

Patients and healthy subjects

A total of 30 TLE patients volunteered to participate in the study (15 females; mean age 39.9 years; age range 18–57). Twenty-five patients were right-handed (self-reported), and functional magnetic resonance imaging indicated left-sided language dominance in all 5 left-handed patients. In all patients diagnosis of unilateral TLE with partial and/or secondary generalized tonic clonic seizures was based on typical clinical seizure semiology, interictal and ictal EEG findings and the results of

Behavioral performance

On average, all participants correctly classified (mean ± standard deviation) 95.42% ± 5% of the objects, 93.52% ± 7.9% of high-ranking buildings, and 93.52% ± 8.3% of low-ranking buildings. To test whether correct responses to the stimuli differed between the three groups (normal controls, HS+, and HS−) we first conducted a repeated-measures ANOVA with the within-subjects factor STIMULUS (objects vs. high-ranking buildings vs. low-ranking buildings) and the between-subjects factor PATHOLOGY (healthy

Discussion

To examine whether the hippocampus participates in the differentiation between high- and low-ranking buildings and whether hippocampal sclerosis interferes with this process we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in healthy subjects and in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) with (HS+) and without (HS−) hippocampal sclerosis. In line with results from our previous study performed in a different group of healthy subjects (Oppenheim et al., 2009) we could show that ERP responses

Conclusions

Theories of rhetoric and architectural design have postulated since a long time that buildings have more or less impact on the minds of their beholders according to a ranking of architectural ornaments between the two poles of the “sublime” and the “low.” However, to our knowledge, this assumption has not been tested scientifically yet with neurophysiological methods. Our findings indicate that visual processing as indexed by two different ERP components is indeed sensitive to the architectural

Acknowledgments

We thank Peter Hilfiker and Ian Mothersill for technical support and Gerhard Blechinger for helpful suggestions. We also would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments regarding the improvement of our manuscript.

References (61)

  • HolcombP.J. et al.

    Event-related brain potentials reflect semantic priming in an object decision task

    Brain Cogn.

    (1994)
  • LalouschekW. et al.

    Event-related potentials in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy reveal topography specific lateralization in relation to the side of the epileptic focus

    Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol.

    (1998)
  • OlichneyJ.M. et al.

    Absent event-related potential (ERP) word repetition effects in mild Alzheimer's disease

    Clin. Neurophysiol.

    (2006)
  • PuceA. et al.

    P3 latency jitter assessed using 2 techniques. II. Surface and sphenoidal recordings in subjects with focal epilepsy

    Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol.

    (1994)
  • RuggM.D. et al.

    Event-related potentials and the recollection of low and high frequency words

    Neuropsychologia

    (1995)
  • SchendanH.E. et al.

    Neurophysiological evidence for two processing times for visual object identification

    Neuropsychologia

    (2002)
  • SchendanH.E. et al.

    Object knowledge during entry-level categorization is activated and modified by implicit memory after 200 ms

    Neuroimage

    (2009)
  • SunW. et al.

    Attention changes in epilepsy patients following 3-month topiramate or valproate treatment revealed by event-related potential

    Int. J. Psychophysiol.

    (2008)
  • VannucciM. et al.

    Hippocampus proper distinguishes between identified and unidentified real-life visual objects: an intracranial ERP study

    Neurosci. Lett.

    (2006)
  • VerlegerR. et al.

    Event-related potentials suggest slowing of brain processes in generalized epilepsy and alterations of visual processing in patients with partial seizures

    Brain Res. Cogn. Brain Res

    (1997)
  • WildingE.L. et al.

    Recognition memory with and without retrieval of context: an event-related potential study

    Neuropsychologia

    (1995)
  • Alberti, L.B., 1485, De re aedificatoria libri decem....
  • Churchill, W., 1943. Address to the House of Commons (meeting in the House of Lords), 28 October 1943. Cited in...
  • CurranT. et al.

    An electrophysiological comparison of visual categorization and recognition memory

    Cogn. Affect. Behav. Neurosci.

    (2002)
  • DamasioH. et al.

    A neural basis for lexical retrieval

    Nature

    (1996)
  • DüzelE. et al.

    Event-related brain potential correlates of two states of conscious awareness in memory

    Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A.

    (1997)
  • FriedericiA.D. et al.

    Lexical integration: sequential effects of syntactic and semantic information

    Mem. Cogn.

    (1999)
  • GrantA.C. et al.

    Temporal lobe epilepsy does not impair visual perception

    Epilepsia

    (2008)
  • GrunwaldT. et al.

    Verbal novelty detection within the human hippocampus proper

    Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A.

    (1998)
  • GrunwaldT. et al.

    Limbic P300s in temporal lobe epilepsy with and without Ammon's horn sclerosis

    Eur. J. Neurosci.

    (1999)

    • Cited by (0)

    View full text
    Copyright © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.