Head Space
How our brains perceive the physical world
Nearly thirty years ago, scientists demonstrated that visually recognizing an object, such as a cup, and performing a visually guided action, such as picking the cup up, involved distinct neural processes, located in different areas of the brain. A new study shows that the same is true for how the brain perceives our environment—it has two distinct systems, one for recognizing a place and another for navigating through it.
The Journal of Neuroscience published the finding by researchers at Emory University, based on experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results showed that the brain's parahippocampal place area responded more strongly to a scene recognition task while the occipital place area responded more to a navigation task.
The work could have important implications for helping people to recover from brain injuries and for the design of computer vision systems, such as self-driving cars.
"It's thrilling to learn what different regions of the brain are doing," says Daniel Dilks, senior author of the study and assistant professor of psychology. "Learning how the mind makes sense of all the information that we're bombarded with every day is one of the greatest of intellectual quests. It's about understanding what makes us human."
