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Abstract Details

Dissociable Systems for Recognizing Places and Navigating through them: Causal and Developmental Evidence.
Aging, Dementia, and Behavioral Neurology
P12 - Poster Session 12 (12:00 PM-1:00 PM)
10-002
To compare navigation and categorization abilities in typically developing children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic disorder involving cortical thinning in and around the occipital place area (OPA).
Humans recognize a place or “scene” in a fraction of a second and almost simultaneously navigate that scene flawlessly and effortlessly. Functional MRI (fMRI) evidence suggests that human visual scene processing is supported by at least two functionally distinct systems; visually-guided navigation, including the occipital place area (OPA), and scene categorization (i.e. recognizing city vs. a beach), including the parahippocampal place area (PPA). It is unknown, however, whether these systems arise along differential timelines in typical development and whether they are causally dissociable – possibilities that would greatly strengthen the claim that these systems are in fact distinct.
Here we addressed these questions by testing navigation and categorization abilities in typically developing children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic disorder involving cortical thinning of the OPA. During the categorization task, participants imagined standing in a room, and indicated whether they were in a bedroom, kitchen, or living room. During the navigation task, participants imagined walking through the room and indicated whether they could leave through a door on the left, center, or right wall by following a path on the floor that only connects to one of the three doors.
We found that i) navigation and categorization develop along differential timelines in typical development, with the navigation maturing more slowly across childhood than the categorization system; and ii) that WS adults are selectively impaired in navigation relative to mental-age matched controls (i.e., typical developing 7 year olds).
Taken together, our results provide the first developmental and causal evidence for dissociable visually-guided navigation and scene categorization systems, and further suggest that this distinction may have a genetic basis.
Authors/Disclosures
Stephanie Wahab (Medical College of Georgia)
PRESENTER 		No disclosure on file
No disclosure on file
No disclosure on file
No disclosure on file