The occipital place area represents visual information about walking, not crawling Open Access

Abstract

It has recently been hypothesized that the occipital place area (OPA) – a scene-selective region in adult humans – supports “visually-guided navigation” (i.e., finding our way through the local visual environment, avoiding boundaries and obstacles). Here we directly test this hypothesis using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in adult humans. Specifically, we measured the responses in OPA to videos depicting the actual first-person visual experience of moving through local environments – from either a “walking” or “crawling” perspective, as well as two control conditions: “flying” and “scrambled”. If OPA indeed supports visually-guided navigation, then it will respond only to visual information from perspectives by which humans actually move through their local environments (i.e., beginning with crawling in infancy followed by walking), and not from perspectives by which humans do not (i.e., flying and scrambled). Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that that OPA responded significantly more to the walking videos compared to the flying and scrambled ones. Surprisingly, however, OPA also responded more to the walking videos than to the crawling videos, and, moreover, responded similarly to the crawling, flying, and scrambled videos. Taken together, these results i) reveal that OPA is involved in visually-guided navigation, but only from a walking perspective, not from a crawling perspective, ii) suggest that crawling is processed by an entirely different neural system, and iii) raise intriguing questions for how OPA develops; namely, that OPA may have never supported crawling during development, consistent with the hypothesis that OPA undergoes protracted development.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION                                                                                                                          1

METHODS                                                                                                                                     2

RESULTS                                                                                                                                       7

DISCUSSION                                                                                                                               11

FIGURE 1                                                                                                                                     18

FIGURE 2                                                                                                                                     19

FIGURE 3                                                                                                                                     20

About this Master's Thesis

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Psychology
Subfield / Discipline	Cognition and Development
Degree	M.A.
Submission	Master's Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Psychology, Cognitive
Keyword	Occipital Place Area Visually-guided navigation
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Daniel D. Dilks, Emory University Lynne Nygaard, Emory University
Committee Members	Philip Kragel, Emory University

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