A small study supported by the National Eye Institute found that effectively moving through an area on foot requires the use of a special area of the brain’s cortex (NEI). Other forms of movement, such as crawling, result in the occipital place area (OPA) failing to activate. The discovery might explain developmental milestones as kids start to navigate and interact with their immediate environments. It was written up in the journal Cerebral Cortex. The National Institutes of Health includes NEI.
The brain must process several different types of information in order to navigate through a physical environment, which can range from a small room to an entire city. The cerebral cortex of the brain processes each class of information in a separate region, which then cooperates to support navigation behavior, such as walking. Loss of any one of these regions can affect how or whether someone can successfully navigate.
The OPA and the retrosplenial complex are the two primary regions of the cortex that are active as a person moves through an environment (RSC). According to Daniel Dilks, Ph.D., of Emory University in Atlanta, each of these regions supports a unique type of navigation. The RSC supports map-based navigation, which entails finding a route from a particular location to a far-off, inaccessible location (for example, finding our way from your house to your favorite restaurant).
On the other hand, he thinks the OPA favors visually guided navigation, which entails navigating through our immediate environment while avoiding boundaries and obstacles (for example, moving through your kitchen without bumping into things).
The OPA does not appear to support visually guided navigation until around the age of 8, which makes his theory controversial.Yet children somehow manage to get around their homes and schools long before that time – even from the earliest ages, when they crawl rather than walk.While most adults and older children primarily navigate environments by walking, we retain the ability to crawl as we did in infancy. If OPA just matured slowly, then it should be activated by both modes of movement, Dilks reasoned. So, he and students Christopher Jones and Joshua Byland set out to discover whether the OPA would activate in adults when crawling.
