Rebecca J. Rennert¹, Daniel D. Dilks¹; ¹Emory University

Young children can navigate their immediately visible surroundings years before the occipital place area (OPA) – a cortical region that supports “visually-guided navigation” in adults – becomes functional. But how? Here we hypothesize that the superior parietal lobule (SPL), a newly identified cortical region also implicated in visually-guided navigation in adults, develops earlier and may therefore support these early navigation abilities. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) adaptation in 5-year-old children, we tested whether SPL – unlike OPA – already represents left/right information critical for visually-guided navigation. Indeed, SPL represented this information, indicating that it develops earlier and may scaffold visually-guided navigation before OPA. These findings suggest a developmental cascade across parietal regions supporting visually-guided navigation and raise new questions about how these regions influence each other as the brain matures.