The use of environmental cues is essential for visually guided navigation. To bring external cues into an internal navigation system, the perceptual system needs to initially process them. Among multiple environmental cues, distance to boundaries has been suggested as an important piece of information. I propose that the functional constraint on navigation is a crucial feature defining boundaries and the navigational distance to a boundary. In a series of three functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments, I investigate whether there is a coding of navigational distance provided by a local boundary, whether it is sensitive to different amounts of navigational distance, and how the functional constraint of a boundary plays a role in coding the navigational distance. A virtual reality software was used to render indoor environments with different types of a boundary and to systematically manipulate distance to such boundaries. Using a multivoxel pattern classification employing a linear support vector machine, I found that the occipital place area (OPA) is sensitive to the navigational distance restricted by the transparent glass wall. The OPA showed the sensitivity to changes of navigational distance restricted by the local boundary (i.e., glass wall). In addition, the OPA was sensitive to a non-crossable boundary only, suggesting an importance of the functional constraint of a boundary. Taken together, I propose that the OPA acts as a perceptual source of external environmental features, such as navigational boundaries and the egocentric distance to them.
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Neural Coding of Navigational Distance and Functional Constraint of a Local Scene Boundary
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