Prolonged functional development of the parahippocampal place area and occipital place area

Abstract

Successful navigation of our surroundings is of high environmental relevance and involves processing of the visual scenery. Scene-processing undergoes a major behavioral improvement during childhood. However, possible neural changes that underlie this cognitive development in scene perception are understudied in comparison to other stimulus categories. We used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scene localizer and behavioral recognition and memory tasks in 7-8-year-olds, 11-12-year-olds, and adults to test whether scene-selective areas—the parahippocampal place area (PPA), the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), and the occipital place area (OPA)—show a change in volume and selectivity with age, and whether this change is correlated with behavioral perception and memory performance. We find that children have a smaller PPA and OPA than adults, while the size of RSC does not differ. Furthermore, selectivity for scenes in the PPA and the OPA, but not in the RSC, increases with age. This increase seems to be driven by both increasing responses to preferred stimuli and decreasing responses to non-preferred stimuli. Our findings extend previous knowledge about visual cortex development by unveiling the underlying mechanisms of age-related volume and selectivity increases in the scene network especially elucidating the poorly understood development of the OPA.