Department of Neurology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
Neuroimage. 2010 Feb 1;49(3):1977-90. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.10.081. Epub 2009 Nov 4.
Although visual cortical engagement in haptic shape perception is well established, its relationship with visual imagery remains controversial. We addressed this using functional magnetic resonance imaging during separate visual object imagery and haptic shape perception tasks. Two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, the haptic shape task employed unfamiliar, meaningless objects, whereas familiar objects were used in the second experiment. The activations evoked by visual object imagery overlapped more extensively, and their magnitudes were more correlated, with those evoked during haptic shape perception of familiar, compared to unfamiliar, objects. In the companion paper (Deshpande et al., this issue), we used task-specific functional and effective connectivity analyses to provide convergent evidence: these analyses showed that the neural networks underlying visual imagery were similar to those underlying haptic shape perception of familiar, but not unfamiliar, objects. We conclude that visual object imagery is more closely linked to haptic shape perception when objects are familiar, compared to when they are unfamiliar.
虽然触觉形状感知中的视觉皮层参与已经得到很好的证实，但它与视觉意象的关系仍然存在争议。我们使用功能磁共振成像在单独的视觉物体意象和触觉形状感知任务中解决了这个问题。进行了两项实验。在第一个实验中，触觉形状任务使用了不熟悉的、无意义的物体，而在第二个实验中则使用了熟悉的物体。与不熟悉的物体相比，视觉物体意象引起的激活重叠范围更广，其幅度相关性更高，在熟悉的物体进行触觉形状感知时。在相关的论文中（Deshpande 等人，本期），我们使用特定于任务的功能和有效连通性分析提供了一致的证据：这些分析表明，视觉意象的神经网络与熟悉物体的触觉形状感知的神经网络相似，但与不熟悉物体的神经网络不同。我们得出结论，与不熟悉的物体相比，当物体熟悉时，视觉物体意象与触觉形状感知的联系更紧密。
