CogLunch: Freddy Kamps "Functional organization and development of visually-guided navigation"
Description
Speaker: Freddy Kamps
Affiliation: Postdoc MIT BCS (Kanwisher & Saxe Labs)
Title: Functional organization and development of visually-guided navigation
Abstract: Human vision allows us to flawlessly navigate the local visual environment, or “scene”. This task is far from trivial, yet humans learn to do it without instruction, easily surpassing performance of state-of-the-art computer vision systems. How? In this talk, I will describe a series of experiments testing two interrelated hypotheses about the functional organization and development of visual representations of the local navigable space. First, we hypothesize that the occipital place area (OPA), an understudied scene-selective region in the dorsal visual pathway, plays a specialized role in representing visual scenes as navigable spaces. Addressing this hypothesis, I will describe a series of recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in adults, which show that OPA encodes both the navigational affordances of the local environment and the ongoing dynamics of ego-motion through that environment. But how do these visual scene representations develop? We next hypothesize that OPA not only encodes scenes as navigable spaces in adulthood, but further that the development of these scene representations depends on active navigational experience in infancy. Addressing this hypothesis, I will describe a series of behavioral studies showing that infant looking toward navigational affordances emerges sometime between 5 and 16 months, during a period of significant locomotor development. I will also describe ongoing work studying scene responses in the developing OPA directly using awake infant fMRI. Taken together, I argue that the currently available data suggest a specialized role for OPA in representing dynamic visual scene information critical for planning and guiding navigation, and that these scene representations emerge in infancy around the time of infants’ first experience with active navigation.
Location: 46-3310 (Note: The speaker will be presenting virtually, but there will still be lunch and a projected in-person attendance option).