The Occipital Place Area Is Causally Involved in Representing Environmental Boundaries during Navigation.

ABSTRACT: Thirty years of research suggests that environmental boundaries-e.g., the walls of an experimental chamber or room-exert powerful influence on navigational behavior, often to the exclusion of other cues [1-9]. Consistent with this behavioral work, neurons in brain structures that instantiate spatial memory often exhibit firing fields that are strongly controlled by environmental boundaries [10-15]. Despite the clear importance of environmental boundaries for spatial coding, however, a brain region that mediates the perception of boundary information has not yet been identified. We hypothesized that the occipital place area (OPA), a scene-selective region located near the transverse occipital sulcus [16], might provide this perceptual source by extracting boundary information from visual sc

SUBMITTER: Julian JB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5565511 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature