Fugelsang Jonathan A, Roser Matthew E, Corballis Paul M, Gazzaniga Michael S, Dunbar Kevin N
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, 6207 Moore Hall, Hanover, NH 03755, USA.
Brain Res Cogn Brain Res. 2005 Jun;24(1):41-7. doi: 10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2004.12.001. Epub 2005 Apr 19.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to examine the neural correlates of perceptual causality. Participants were imaged while viewing alternating blocks of causal events in which a ball collides with, and causes movement of another ball, versus non-causal events in which a spatial or a temporal gap precedes the movement of a second ball. There were significantly higher levels of relative activation in the right middle frontal gyrus and the right inferior parietal lobule for causal relative to non-causal events. Furthermore, when the differential effects of spatial and temporal incontiguities were subtracted from the contiguous stimuli, we observed both common (right prefrontal) and unique (right parietal and right temporal) regions of activation as a function of spatial and temporal processing of contiguity, respectively. Taken together, these data provide a means to help determine how the visual system extracts causality from dynamic visual information in the environment using spatial and temporal cues.
功能磁共振成像（fMRI）被用于检查因果知觉的神经关联。参与者在观看交替出现的因果事件（一个球碰撞并导致另一个球移动）和非因果事件（第二个球移动之前存在空间或时间间隔）的块时接受成像。与非因果事件相比，因果事件在右侧额中回和右侧顶下小叶的相对激活水平显著更高。此外，当从连续刺激中减去空间和时间不连续的差异效应时，我们分别观察到作为连续性空间和时间处理函数的共同（右侧前额叶）和独特（右侧顶叶和右侧颞叶）激活区域。综上所述，这些数据提供了一种方法，有助于确定视觉系统如何利用空间和时间线索从环境中的动态视觉信息中提取因果关系。
