Dissociable systems for recognizing places and navigating through them: causal and developmental evidence Open Access

Abstract

Humans have the effortless ability to perceive the local visual environment, or “scene”. In a brief glance, we can recognize both what kind of scene it is (e.g., city or a beach), and how to navigate through that scene without running into obstacles. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) evidence suggests that these remarkable human visual scene processing abilities may be supported by two functionally distinct systems with distinct neural bases: one for visually-guided navigation (i.e., how do I get around this place?), including the occipital place area (OPA), and the second for scene categorization (i.e., what kind of place it is), including the parahippocampal place area (PPA). Importantly, however, fMRI data are only correlational, and a stronger test of the hypothesis of independent visually-guided navigation and scene categorization systems would ask i) are these two systems causally dissociable (where one system can be impaired while the other spared), and further, ii) do these systems arise along different timelines in typical development? Here we tested visually-guided navigation and scene categorization abilities in adults with Williams syndrome (WS; a genetic developmental disorder involving cortical thinning in and around the posterior parietal lobe, potentially including OPA, but not PPA), as well as typically developing four- and seven-year-old children. Indeed, we found that i) WS adults show greater impairment on visually-guided navigation than scene categorization, relative to mental-age matched control participants; and ii) visually-guided navigation matures more slowly than scene categorization in typically developing children. These findings provide the first causal and developmental evidence for dissociable systems for categorizing scenes and navigating through them.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction…………….………...………………………....1

2. Methods….………………………...………..………………..4

3. Results….……………………………………........…….……6

4. Discussion………………….………………..……………...12

5. Tables………………………………………..…...……........18

6. Figures………….…………………………...……………….19

7. References………………….………………...….………....23

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology
Degree	B.S.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Cognitive
Keyword	Scene perception Occipital place area (OPA) Williams syndrome (WS) Navigation Development Parahippocampal place area (PPA)
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Dilks, Daniel D., Emory University
Committee Members	Lourenco, Stella, Emory University Khan, Jaffar, Emory University

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