Institute of Psychology I, University of Leipzig, Seeburgstr. 14-20, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Int J Psychophysiol. 2010 Aug;77(2):126-34. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2010.05.003. Epub 2010 May 15.
Recent neuroscience studies using visual mismatch negativity (visual MMN), an event-related brain potential (ERP) index of memory-mismatch processes in the visual sensory system, have shown that although sequential regularities embedded in successive visual stimuli can be automatically represented in the visual sensory system, an existence of sequential regularity itself does not guarantee that the sequential regularity will be automatically represented. In the present study, we investigated the effects of top-down attention on sequential regularity representation in the visual sensory system. Our results showed that a sequential regularity (SSSSD) embedded in a modified oddball sequence where infrequent deviant (D) and frequent standard stimuli (S) differing in luminance were regularly presented (SSSSDSSSSDSSSSD...) was represented in the visual sensory system only when participants attended the sequential regularity in luminance, but not when participants ignored the stimuli or simply attended the dimension of luminance per se. This suggests that top-down attention affects sequential regularity representation in the visual sensory system and that top-down attention is a prerequisite for particular sequential regularities to be represented.
最近的神经科学研究使用视觉失匹配负波（视觉 MMN），这是一种与视觉感觉系统中记忆不匹配过程相关的事件相关脑电位（ERP）指标，表明尽管嵌入连续视觉刺激中的序列规律可以在视觉感觉系统中自动表示，但序列规律的存在本身并不能保证序列规律将被自动表示。在本研究中，我们调查了自上而下的注意力对视觉感觉系统中序列规律表示的影响。我们的结果表明，在修改的Oddball 序列中嵌入的序列规律（SSSSD）中，亮度不同的罕见偏离（D）和常见标准刺激（S）规则呈现（SSSSDSSSSDSSSSD...），只有当参与者关注亮度中的序列规律时，才会在视觉感觉系统中表示出来，而当参与者忽略刺激或仅关注亮度本身的维度时则不会。这表明自上而下的注意力会影响视觉感觉系统中序列规律的表示，并且自上而下的注意力是特定序列规律被表示的前提条件。
