“Walking selectivity” in the occipital place area in 8-year-olds, not 5-year-olds

Abstract 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.