Pressnitzer Daniel, Hupé Jean-Michel
Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception (FRE 2929), CNRS, Université René Descartes Paris 5, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Département d'Etudes Cognitives, 29 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France.
Curr Biol. 2006 Jul 11;16(13):1351-7. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2006.05.054.
When dealing with natural scenes, sensory systems have to process an often messy and ambiguous flow of information. A stable perceptual organization nevertheless has to be achieved in order to guide behavior. The neural mechanisms involved can be highlighted by intrinsically ambiguous situations. In such cases, bistable perception occurs: distinct interpretations of the unchanging stimulus alternate spontaneously in the mind of the observer. Bistable stimuli have been used extensively for more than two centuries to study visual perception. Here we demonstrate that bistable perception also occurs in the auditory modality. We compared the temporal dynamics of percept alternations observed during auditory streaming with those observed for visual plaids and the susceptibilities of both modalities to volitional control. Strong similarities indicate that auditory and visual alternations share common principles of perceptual bistability. The absence of correlation across modalities for subject-specific biases, however, suggests that these common principles are implemented at least partly independently across sensory modalities. We propose that visual and auditory perceptual organization could rely on distributed but functionally similar neural competition mechanisms aimed at resolving sensory ambiguities.
在处理自然场景时，感觉系统必须处理通常杂乱且模糊的信息流。然而，为了指导行为，仍需实现稳定的知觉组织。内在模糊的情境能够凸显其中涉及的神经机制。在这种情况下，会出现双稳态知觉：观察者脑海中对不变刺激的不同解释会自发交替。两个多世纪以来，双稳态刺激已被广泛用于研究视觉感知。在此我们证明，双稳态知觉在听觉模态中也会出现。我们比较了在听觉流中观察到的知觉交替的时间动态与在视觉方格中观察到的情况，以及两种模态对意志控制的敏感度。强烈的相似性表明，听觉和视觉交替共享知觉双稳态的共同原则。然而，不同模态之间针对个体特异性偏差不存在相关性，这表明这些共同原则至少部分是在不同感觉模态中独立实现的。我们提出，视觉和听觉知觉组织可能依赖于分布式但功能相似的神经竞争机制，旨在解决感觉模糊性。
