Department of Psychology, Social Science Centre, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2010 May;22(5):970-84. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2009.21256.
In one popular account of the human visual system, two streams are distinguished, a ventral stream specialized for perception and a dorsal stream specialized for action. The skillful use of familiar tools, however, is likely to involve the cooperation of both streams. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we scanned individuals while they viewed short movies of familiar tools being grasped in ways that were either consistent or inconsistent with how tools are typically grasped during use. Typical-for-use actions were predicted to preferentially activate parietal areas important for tool use. Instead, our results revealed several areas within the ventral stream, as well as the left posterior middle temporal gyrus, as preferentially active for our typical-for-use actions. We believe these findings reflect sensitivity to learned semantic associations and suggest a special role for these areas in representing object-specific actions. We hypothesize that during actual tool use a complex interplay between the two streams must take place, with ventral stream areas providing critical input as to how an object should be engaged in accordance with stored semantic knowledge.
在一种流行的人类视觉系统解释中，区分出两个流，一个专门用于感知的腹侧流和一个专门用于行动的背侧流。然而，熟练地使用熟悉的工具可能需要两个流的合作。我们使用功能磁共振成像技术，在个体观看熟悉工具以与使用中常见的方式一致或不一致的方式被抓住的短片时对其进行扫描。预期典型使用动作会优先激活对工具使用很重要的顶叶区域。相反，我们的结果显示，腹侧流内的几个区域以及左后颞中回优先对我们的典型使用动作活跃。我们认为这些发现反映了对学习语义关联的敏感性，并表明这些区域在表示特定于对象的动作方面具有特殊作用。我们假设，在实际工具使用过程中，两个流之间必须进行复杂的相互作用，腹侧流区域根据存储的语义知识提供有关如何按照对象进行操作的关键输入。
