AI Summary
Recent research suggests that the human brain has separate systems for recognizing places and navigating through them. The study tested these abilities in children and adults with Williams syndrome and found that visually guided navigation develops later than scene categorization and is impaired in adults with Williams syndrome, while scene categorization remains intact. These findings support the idea of separate cognitive systems for recognizing places and navigating through them.
Recent neural evidence suggests that the human brain contains dissociable systems for “scene categorization” (i.e., recognizing a place as a particular kind of place, for example, a kitchen), including the parahippocampal place area, and “visually guided navigation” (e.g., finding our way through a kitchen, not running into the kitchen walls or banging into the kitchen table), including the occipital place area. However, converging behavioral data — for instance, whether scene categorization and visually guided navigation abilities develop along different timelines and whether there is differential breakdown under neurologic deficit — would provide even stronger support for this two-scene-systems hypothesis. Thus, here we tested scene categorization and visually guided navigation abilities in 131 typically developing children between 4 and 9 years of age, as well as 46 adults with Williams syndrome, a developmental disorder with known impairment on “action” tasks, yet relative sparing on “perception” tasks, in object processing. We found that (1) visually guided navigation is later to develop than scene categorization, and (2) Williams syndrome adults are impaired in visually guided navigation, but not scene categorization, relative to mental age-matched children. Together, these findings provide the first developmental and neuropsychological evidence for dissociable cognitive systems for recognizing places and navigating through them.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Two decades ago, Milner and Goodale showed us that identifying objects and manipulating them involve distinct cognitive and neural