When a person views a scene, be it a city street or grassy hills, the brains parahippocampal place area (PPA) processes it mainly on the basis of its spatial characteristics, not its contents. That's the finding of Dwight Kravitz and his colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of volunteers as they viewed 96 scenes ranging from open, natural environments to enclosed rooms. Scenes that were spatially similar - such as those depicting either open or closed environments -elicited similar PPA responses. However, scenes with the same kind of content - for example, man-made features - did not.
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