Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, 10 Center Drive, Bethesda, MD 20892-1366, USA.
Curr Biol. 2010 Jan 12;20(1):32-6. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.10.077.
Prolonged viewing of a stimulus results in a subsequent perceptual bias. This perceptual adaptation and the resulting aftereffect reveal important characteristics regarding how perceptual systems are tuned. These aftereffects occur not only for simple stimulus features but also for high-level stimulus properties. Here we report a novel cross-category adaptation aftereffect demonstrating that prolonged viewing of a human body without a face shifts the perceptual tuning curve for face gender and face identity. This contradicts a central assumption underlying perceptual adaptation: that adaptation depends on physical similarity between how the adapting and the adapted features are perceived. Additionally, this aftereffect was not due to response bias, because its dependence on adaptation duration resembled traditional perceptual aftereffects. These body-to-face adaptation results demonstrate that bodies alone can alter the tuning properties of neurons that code for the gender and identity of faces. More generally, these results reveal that high-level perceptual adaptation can occur when the property or features being adapted are automatically inferred rather than perceived in the adapting stimulus.
长时间观看刺激物会导致后续的感知偏差。这种感知适应和由此产生的后效揭示了关于感知系统如何调谐的重要特征。这些后效不仅出现在简单的刺激特征上，也出现在高级刺激属性上。在这里，我们报告了一种新的跨类别适应后效，表明长时间观看没有面部的人体会改变面孔性别和面孔身份的感知调谐曲线。这与感知适应的一个基本假设相矛盾：适应取决于适应和被适应特征在感知上的物理相似性。此外，这种后效不是由于响应偏差引起的，因为它对适应持续时间的依赖性类似于传统的感知后效。这些身体到面孔的适应结果表明，仅仅身体就可以改变编码面孔性别和身份的神经元的调谐特性。更一般地说，这些结果表明，当被适应的属性或特征是自动推断而不是在适应刺激中感知到时，高级感知适应也会发生。
