Kristjánsson Arni, Campana Gianluca
University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2010 Jan;72(1):5-18. doi: 10.3758/APP.72.1.5.
What we have recently seen and attended to strongly influences how we subsequently allocate visual attention. A clear example is how repeated presentation of an object's features or location in visual search tasks facilitates subsequent detection or identification of that item, a phenomenon known as priming. Here, we review a large body of results from priming studies that suggest that a short-term implicit memory system guides our attention to recently viewed items. The nature of this memory system and the processing level at which visual priming occurs are still debated. Priming might be due to activity modulations of low-level areas coding simple stimulus characteristics or to higher level episodic memory representations of whole objects or visual scenes. Indeed, recent evidence indicates that only minor changes to the stimuli used in priming studies may alter the processing level at which priming occurs. We also review recent behavioral, neuropsychological, and neurophysiological evidence that indicates that the priming patterns are reflected in activity modulations at multiple sites along the visual pathways. We furthermore suggest that studies of priming in visual search may potentially shed important light on the nature of cortical visual representations. Our conclusion is that priming occurs at many different levels of the perceptual hierarchy, reflecting activity modulations ranging from lower to higher levels, depending on the stimulus, task, and context-in fact, the neural loci that are involved in the analysis of the stimuli for which priming effects are seen.
我们最近所看到和关注的事物会强烈影响我们随后分配视觉注意力的方式。一个明显的例子是，在视觉搜索任务中，物体特征或位置的重复呈现如何促进对该物体的后续检测或识别，这一现象被称为启动效应。在此，我们回顾了大量启动效应研究的结果，这些结果表明，一个短期的内隐记忆系统引导我们将注意力投向最近看过的物品。这个记忆系统的本质以及视觉启动效应发生的加工水平仍存在争议。启动效应可能是由于编码简单刺激特征的低级区域的活动调制，或者是由于整个物体或视觉场景的高级情景记忆表征。事实上，最近的证据表明，启动效应研究中使用的刺激只需有微小变化，就可能改变启动效应发生的加工水平。我们还回顾了最近的行为学、神经心理学和神经生理学证据，这些证据表明启动效应模式反映在视觉通路多个部位的活动调制中。我们进一步认为，视觉搜索中的启动效应研究可能会为皮层视觉表征的本质提供重要启示。我们的结论是，启动效应发生在感知层次结构的许多不同水平上，反映了从低级到高级的活动调制，这取决于刺激、任务和背景——实际上，取决于参与对呈现启动效应的刺激进行分析的神经位点。
