Hee Kyung Yoon¹, Yaelan Jung¹, Andrew S. Persichetti², Danny D. Dilks¹; ¹Emory University, ²National Institute of Mental Health

Previous research has suggested that a newly discovered scene-selective region in the superior parietal lobule (SPL) is involved in visually-guided navigation (i.e., our ability to move about the immediately visible environment, avoiding boundaries and obstacles). More specifically, SPL has been shown to exhibit sensitivity to first-person perspective motion information through scenes – one kind of information necessary for visually-guided navigation – and to be preferentially connected to the occipital place area (OPA) – another scene-selective region involved in visually-guided navigation. Here, we further test the hypothesis that SPL is involved in visually-guided navigation by asking whether SPL i) represents “sense” (left/right) information – another kind of information necessary for visually-guided navigation and ii) responds more while participants actually perform a visually-guided navigation task compared to a scene categorization (control) task. First, using fMRI adaptation, we found that SPL is sensitive to sense information in scenes, consistent with its hypothesized role in visually-guided navigation. Critically, such sensitivity to sense information was not exhibited for objects. Second, a reanalysis of previously published data investigating OPA’s role in visually-guided navigation, we found that SPL, like OPA, responded significantly more during a visually-guided navigation task than during a scene categorization task, again consistent with its hypothesized role in visually-guided navigation. Crucially, SPL responded similarly during both the scene categorization task and a “baseline” (one-back) task, revealing its total lack of involvement in scene categorization. Taken together, these results, coupled with prior evidence, reveal that SPL is indeed a scene-selective region involved in visually-guided navigation.

Acknowledgements: National Eye Institute