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

Abstract

Recent work has shown that the occipital place area (OPA)—a scene-selective region in adult humans—supports “visually guided navigation” (i.e. moving about the local visual environment and avoiding boundaries/obstacles). But what is the precise role of OPA in visually guided navigation? Considering humans move about their local environments beginning with crawling followed by walking, 1 possibility is that OPA is involved in both modes of locomotion. Another possibility is that OPA is specialized for walking only, since walking and crawling are different kinds of locomotion. To test these possibilities, we measured the responses in OPA to first-person perspective videos from both “walking” and “crawling” perspectives as well as for 2 conditions by which humans do not navigate (“flying” and “scrambled”). We found that OPA responded more to walking videos than to any of the others, including crawling, and did not respond more to crawling videos than to flying or scrambled ones. These results (i) reveal that OPA represents visual information only from a walking (not crawling) perspective, (ii) suggest crawling is processed by a different neural system, and (iii) raise questions for how OPA develops; namely, OPA may have never supported crawling, which is consistent with the hypothesis that OPA undergoes protracted development.

A previously undescribed scene-selective site is the key to encoding ego-motion in natural environments

“…Speci cally, Kamps and colleagues have shown increased response in TOS/OPA during ego-motion vs. static scene presentation (Kamps et al, 2016). Jones et al have also shown that ego-motion (and not other types of movements) enhances TOS/OPA activity when compared to scrambled scenes (Jones et al, 2023). In contrast to these ndings, our tests showed weak-to-no egomotion related activity enhancement in area TOS/OPA.…”

A previously undescribed scene-selective site is the key to encoding ego-motion in naturalistic environments

“…Specifically, Kamps and colleagues have shown increased response in TOS/OPA during ego-motion vs. static scene presentation ( Kamps et al, 2016 ). Jones et al, 2023 have also shown that ego-motion (and not other types of movements) enhances TOS/OPA activity when compared to scrambled scenes. In contrast to these findings, our tests showed weak-to-no ego-motion-related activity enhancement in area TOS/OPA.…”

“…While in our study, the coherently and incoherently changing stimuli were refreshed with the same temporal frequency (see ‘Methods’). In the study by Jones et al, 2023 , the response to scrambled scenes was used as a control condition, whereas our stimuli were more equivalent, differing only in the sequence of image presentation. Moreover, these studies used higher levels of spatial smoothing (FWHM = 5 mm) compared to the values we used here during preprocessing.…”

A previously undescribed scene-selective site is the key to encoding ego-motion in naturalistic environments

“…Specifically, Kamps and colleagues have shown increased response in TOS/OPA during ego-motion vs. static scene presentation ( Kamps et al, 2016 ). Jones et al have also shown that ego-motion (and not other types of movements) enhances TOS/OPA activity when compared to scrambled scenes ( Jones et al, 2023 ). In contrast to these findings, our tests showed weak-to-no ego-motion related activity enhancement in area TOS/OPA.…”