Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, USA.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2010 Sep;14(9):425-32. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2010.07.001. Epub 2010 Aug 11.
Until recently, the question of how the brain performs causal inference has been studied primarily in the context of cognitive reasoning. However, this problem is at least equally crucial in perceptual processing. At any given moment, the perceptual system receives multiple sensory signals within and across modalities and, for example, has to determine the source of each of these signals. Recently, a growing number of studies from various fields of cognitive science have started to address this question and have converged to very similar computational models. Therefore, it seems that a common computational strategy, which is highly consistent with a normative model of causal inference, is exploited by the perceptual system in a variety of domains.
直到最近,大脑如何进行因果推断的问题主要在认知推理的背景下进行研究。然而,这个问题在感知处理中至少同样重要。在任何给定的时刻,感知系统都会在模态内和模态间接收多个感觉信号,例如,必须确定这些信号中的每一个的来源。最近,来自认知科学各个领域的越来越多的研究开始解决这个问题,并已经收敛到非常相似的计算模型。因此,似乎感知系统在各种领域中都利用了一种与因果推断的规范模型高度一致的通用计算策略。