Processing architectural ranking across cultures and within the human temporal lobe

The importance of the human hippocampus formation for declarative memory has been known for a long time. Invasive recordings of brain electrical activity directly from within the human temporal lobe have shown that this brain structure is sensitive to stimulus novelty and relevance and that it participates in visual processing. Therefore, we asked whether it is also sensitive to the Western architectural decorum according to which buildings designed to be high-ranking should have more impact on the minds of their beholders than low-ranking buildings. Recording brain electrical activity, we could verify this hypothesis and found that the hippocampus proper contributes critically to visual object identification when object knowledge is complemented by information from semantic and episodic long-term memory. Moreover, by comparing brain electrical responses to drawings of buildings in German and Chinese subjects we found that the identification of architectural ranking is modulated by culturally specific expertise with Western style architecture already at an earlier stage of visual processing. These results suggest it is possible to identify neurophysiological correlates of rhetorically defined stimulus properties that may eventually help to design verbal and visual communication for patients with memory deficits.

Biography
Thomas Grunwald was born in 1956 in Germany and now lives in Zurich, Switzerland. He is a neurologist specializing in clinical and cognitive neurophysiology as well as pre-surgical evaluations for epilepsy surgery at the Swiss Epilepsy Center in Zurich and at the Department of Neurology of the Zurich University Hospital. He teaches neurology at the Bonn University Medical Center and cooperates in the study of neurophysiological correlates of artistic and rhetorical communication with the Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland, and the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany.