We think of our visual environment as a seamless, immersive panorama.  Yet, each view is discrete and fleeting, separated by expansive eye movements and interleaved views of our spatial surroundings. How are discrete views of a panoramic environment knit together into a broad, unified representation?

In this talk, I will present a recent behavioral and fMRI study which demonstrates that memory of a broad, panoramic space enables associations between discrete views of the environment and drives representational overlap between those views in scene-selective visual areas of the brain – RSC and OPA.

These findings illustrate a mechanism by which moment-to-moment visual percepts are integrated into a panoramic representation: discrete views of a scene are affixed to a common representational space in specific scene-selective regions of the brain.