Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent neuroimaging evidence suggests that scene processing depends on dissociable systems for visually-guided navi-gation (including the occipital place area, OPA) and scene categorization (including the parahippocampal place area). Ifthese systems are truly dissociable, then it should be possible to find cases in which one system is impaired, while theother is spared. Further, if dissociable, then these systems may develop independently. Here we tested visually-guidednavigation and scene categorization abilities in 36 adults with Williams syndrome (WS) a developmental disorder in-volving cortical thinning in and around the OPA as well as 82 typically developing 4-8 year old children. We foundthat i) WS adults are impaired in visually-guided navigation, but not scene categorization, relative to mental-age matchedchildren; and ii) visually-guided navigation matures later in typical development than scene categorization. These findingsprovide neuropsychological and developmental evidence for dissociable scene processing systems for recognizing placesand navigating through them.