Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
Cereb Cortex. 2024 Mar 1;34(3). doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhae101.
A recent neuroimaging study in adults found that the occipital place area (OPA)-a cortical region involved in "visually guided navigation" (i.e. moving about the immediately visible environment, avoiding boundaries, and obstacles)-represents visual information about walking, not crawling, suggesting that OPA is late developing, emerging only when children are walking, not beforehand. But when precisely does this "walking selectivity" in OPA emerge-when children first begin to walk in early childhood, or perhaps counterintuitively, much later in childhood, around 8 years of age, when children are adult-like walking? To directly test these two hypotheses, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in two groups of children, 5- and 8-year-olds, we measured the responses in OPA to first-person perspective videos through scenes from a "walking" perspective, as well as three control perspectives ("crawling," "flying," and "scrambled"). We found that the OPA in 8-year-olds-like adults-exhibited walking selectivity (i.e. responding significantly more to the walking videos than to any of the others, and no significant differences across the crawling, flying, and scrambled videos), while the OPA in 5-year-olds exhibited no walking selectively. These findings reveal that OPA undergoes protracted development, with walking selectivity only emerging around 8 years of age.
最近一项针对成年人的神经影像学研究发现，枕部位置区域（OPA）——一个参与“视觉引导导航”（即在可立即看到的环境中移动、避免边界和障碍物）的皮质区域——代表了关于行走的视觉信息，而不是爬行，这表明 OPA 发育较晚，仅在儿童开始行走时才会出现，而不是在此之前。但是，OPA 中的这种“行走选择性”究竟何时出现——是在儿童早期刚开始行走时，还是出人意料地在更晚的 8 岁左右，即儿童开始具有成人般行走方式时？为了直接检验这两种假设，我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）在两组儿童（5 岁和 8 岁）中进行测试，测量了 OPA 对来自“行走”视角的第一人称视角视频的反应，以及三个对照视角（“爬行”、“飞行”和“混乱”）。我们发现，8 岁儿童的 OPA 与成年人一样表现出行走选择性（即对行走视频的反应明显高于其他任何视频，而对爬行、飞行和混乱视频的反应则没有显著差异），而 5 岁儿童的 OPA 则没有行走选择性。这些发现表明，OPA 经历了长期的发育，只有在大约 8 岁左右才会出现行走选择性。
