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.