Bendixen Alexandra, Schröger Erich
Institut für Psychologie I, Universität Leipzig, Seeburgstr. 14-20, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Biol Psychol. 2008 Jul;78(3):231-41. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2008.03.005. Epub 2008 Mar 16.
The capacity for abstraction is vital for adaptive behavior. Based on behavioral data and event-related potentials (ERPs), the present study investigates the brain's ability to encode abstract auditory rules with a dynamic approach in which rules constantly emerge and vanish. In successive conditions, abstract rules are task-irrelevant and task-relevant. Results show that as few as two consecutive exemplars of an abstract feature (frequency relation between successive tones) are sufficient for rule extraction. The extraction of just emerging rules is independent of the amount of attention devoted to the rules, and it is not modulated by further rule-conforming exemplars. The extracted rules are immediately applied, as evidenced by the interference of task-irrelevant rule violations with concurrent mental processes (distraction condition) and by the conscious detection of task-relevant violations (detection condition). The ability to rapidly encode abstract rules and to detect presumably important rule-violating events underlines the brain's adaptability to the environmental demands.
抽象能力对适应性行为至关重要。基于行为数据和事件相关电位（ERP），本研究采用一种动态方法，即规则不断出现和消失的方式，来探究大脑编码抽象听觉规则的能力。在连续的条件下，抽象规则与任务无关和与任务相关。结果表明，仅两个连续的抽象特征（连续音调之间的频率关系）示例就足以进行规则提取。刚刚出现的规则的提取与分配给规则的注意力量无关，并且不会受到更多符合规则的示例的调节。提取的规则会立即应用，任务无关规则违反与并发心理过程的干扰（分心条件）以及对任务相关违反的有意识检测（检测条件）都证明了这一点。快速编码抽象规则以及检测可能重要的规则违反事件的能力突显了大脑对环境需求的适应性。
