"Walking selectivity" in the occipital place area in 8-year-olds, not 5-year-olds.

A recent neuroimaging study in adults found that the occipital place area (OPA)-a cortical region involved in "visually guided navigation" (i.e. moving about the immediately visible environment, avoiding boundaries, and obstacles)-represents visual information about walking, not crawling, suggesting that OPA is late developing, emerging only when children are walking, not beforehand.

The development of human cortical scene processing.

Decades of research have uncovered the neural basis of place (or "scene") processing in adulthood, revealing a set of three regions that respond selectively to visual scene information, each hypothesized to support distinct functions within scene processing (e.g., recognizing a particular kind of place versus navigating through it).

Neural Representations in the Prefrontal Cortex Are Task Dependent for Scene Attributes But Not for Scene Categories.

Natural scenes deliver rich sensory information about the world. Decades of research has shown that the scene-selective network in the visual cortex represents various aspects of scenes. However, less is known about how such complex scene information is processed beyond the visual cortex, such as in the prefrontal cortex.

Children automatically abstract categorical regularities during statistical learning.

Statistical learning allows us to discover myriad structures in our environment, which is saturated with information at many different levels-from items to categories. How do children learn different levels of information-about regularities that pertain to items and the categories they come from-and how does this differ from adults? Studies on category learning and memory have suggested that children may be more focused on items than adults. If this is also the case for statistical learning, children may not extract and learn the multi-level regularities that adults can.

Modality-Independent Coding of Scene Categories in Prefrontal Cortex.

Natural environments convey information through multiple sensory modalities, all of which contribute to people's percepts. Although it has been shown that visual or auditory content of scene categories can be decoded from brain activity, it remains unclear how humans represent scene information beyond a specific sensory modality domain. To address this question, we investigated how categories of scene images and sounds are represented in several brain regions.

Effect of Attention on the Initiation of Binocular Rivalry.

Recent studies suggest that attention is necessary for perceptual alternations in binocular rivalry. It has been shown that attention plays a role in not only accelerating but also even enabling perceptual fluctuation in ongoing phase of binocular rivalry. In this study, we tested whether attention also plays a role in suppressing a rival stimulus in its initial phases by measuring proportions of mixed dominance.

Effects of attention on visible and invisible adapters.

It has been shown that attention can modulate the processing of a stimulus, even when it is invisible (Bahrami, Carmel, Walsh, Rees, & Lavie, 2008, Perception, 37, 1520-1528). Previous studies, however, investigated the effect of spatial attention on the processing of only invisible items. Thus, it remains unclear how the effect of spatial attention is distributed over visible and invisible items when these items are simultaneously attended at the same location.