Kamps Frederik S, Chen Emily M, Kanwisher Nancy, Saxe Rebecca
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States.
Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Imaging Neurosci (Camb). 2025 Jan 10;3. doi: 10.1162/imag_a_00424. eCollection 2025.
Humans effortlessly use vision to plan and guide navigation through the local environment, or "scene." A network of three cortical regions responds selectively to visual scene information, including the occipital (OPA), parahippocampal (PPA), and medial place areas (MPA)-but how this network supports visually guided navigation is unclear. Recent evidence suggests that one region, in particular, the OPA, supports visual representations for navigation, while PPA and MPA support other aspects of scene processing. However, most previous studies tested only static scene images, which lack the dynamic experience of navigating through scenes. We used dynamic movie stimuli to test whether OPA, PPA, and MPA represent two critical kinds of navigationally relevant information: navigational affordances (e.g., can I walk to the left, right, or both?) and ego-motion (e.g., am I walking forward or backward? turning left or right?). We found that OPA is sensitive to both affordances and ego-motion, as well as the conflict between these cues-for example, turning toward vs. away from an open doorway. These effects were significantly weaker or absent in PPA and MPA. Responses in OPA were also dissociable from those in early visual cortex, consistent with the idea that OPA responses are not merely explained by lower-level visual features. OPA responses to affordances and ego-motion were stronger in the contralateral than in ipsilateral visual field, suggesting that OPA encodes navigationally relevant information within an egocentric reference frame. Taken together, these results support the hypothesis that OPA contains visual representations that are useful for planning and guiding navigation through scenes.
人类能够轻松地利用视觉来规划和引导在当地环境或“场景”中的导航。三个皮质区域组成的网络会选择性地对视觉场景信息做出反应，包括枕叶区域（OPA）、海马旁区域（PPA）和内侧位置区域（MPA）——但这个网络如何支持视觉引导的导航尚不清楚。最近的证据表明，特别是其中一个区域，即OPA，支持用于导航的视觉表征，而PPA和MPA支持场景处理的其他方面。然而，之前的大多数研究仅测试了静态场景图像，这些图像缺乏在场景中导航的动态体验。我们使用动态电影刺激来测试OPA、PPA和MPA是否代表两种与导航相关的关键信息：导航可供性（例如，我能向左走、向右走还是两边都能走？）和自我运动（例如，我是向前走还是向后走？向左转还是向右转？）。我们发现，OPA对可供性和自我运动以及这些线索之间的冲突都很敏感——例如，朝着与远离一扇敞开的门转动。这些效应在PPA和MPA中明显较弱或不存在。OPA中的反应也与早期视觉皮层中的反应不同，这与OPA的反应不仅仅由低级视觉特征来解释的观点一致。OPA对可供性和自我运动的反应在对侧视野中比对侧视野更强，这表明OPA在以自我为中心的参考框架内编码与导航相关的信息。综上所述，这些结果支持了这样一种假设，即OPA包含对规划和引导场景导航有用的视觉表征。
