Bridgeman Bruce
Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA.
Vision Res. 2006 Nov;46(24):4075-82. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2006.08.012. Epub 2006 Sep 27.
Lateral inhibition, the inhibition of neurons by other neurons at the same level, exists at several levels of the visual system. Implications of lateral inhibition for sensory coding and perception have been investigated with a mathematical model that accounts for many properties of metacontrast masking and brief storage of sensory information. Here that model simulates object substitution masking, where a target and mask appear simultaneously but the mask disappears after a variable delay. The target becomes strongly masked if the mask offset is delayed after target offset, and target visibility does not recover with longer mask offset delays. Object substitution masking is most effective if attention is diverted by the presence of many simultaneous masks, only one of which surrounds a target. The lateral inhibitory model reproduces the effects of attention on object substitution masking by exploiting the longer latency of response to unattended stimuli. Decreasing the interval over which sensory codes are analyzed, reflecting the shorter latency of response to attended stimuli, weakens the masking in a way that reflects the psychophysical effects of attention.
侧抑制，即同一水平的神经元对其他神经元的抑制，存在于视觉系统的多个层面。人们利用一个数学模型研究了侧抑制对感觉编码和感知的影响，该模型解释了元对比掩蔽和感觉信息短暂存储的许多特性。在此，该模型模拟了客体替代掩蔽，即目标和掩蔽同时出现，但掩蔽在可变延迟后消失。如果掩蔽的消失在目标消失之后延迟，目标就会被强烈掩蔽，并且随着掩蔽消失延迟时间延长，目标的可见性不会恢复。如果注意力被许多同时出现的掩蔽分散，其中只有一个围绕着目标，客体替代掩蔽最为有效。侧抑制模型通过利用对未被注意刺激的较长反应潜伏期，再现了注意力对客体替代掩蔽的影响。缩短分析感觉编码的时间间隔，反映了对被注意刺激的较短反应潜伏期，以一种反映注意力心理物理学效应的方式削弱了掩蔽作用。
