Natural scene statistics account for the representation of scene categories in human visual cortex (Stansbury, Naselaris & Gallant, Neuron, 2013)
Much of human visual cortex appears to be selective for specific categories of natural scenes. However, it is unknown whether this scene selectivity is essentially arbitrary, or rather whether it reflects the statistical structure of natural scenes. This paper uses a machine learning algorithm to discover the intrinsic categorical structure of natural scenes, and then uses fMRI to show that the human brain represents these natural categories.