the parahippocampal gyrus (or hippocampal gyrus) is a grey mattercortical region, a gyrus of the brain that surrounds the hippocampus and is part of the limbic system. the region plays an important role in memory encoding and retrieval.
the parahippocampal place area (PPA) is a sub-region of the parahippocampal cortex that lies medially in the inferior temporo-occipital cortex. PPA plays an important role in the encoding and recognition of environmental scenes (rather than faces).
this region of the brain becomes highly active when human subjects view topographical scene stimuli such as images of landscapes, cityscapes, or rooms (i.e. images of "places")
the region was first described by Russell Epstein and Nancy Kanwisher in 1998 at MIT,.













