Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA.
J Neurosci. 2010 Aug 18;30(33):11177-87. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0858-10.2010.
Our environments are highly regular in terms of when and where objects appear relative to each other. Statistical learning allows us to extract and represent these regularities, but how this knowledge is used by the brain during ongoing perception is unclear. We used rapid event-related fMRI to measure hemodynamic responses to individual visual images in a continuous stream that contained sequential contingencies. Sixteen human observers encountered these statistical regularities while performing an unrelated cognitive task, and were unaware of their existence. Nevertheless, the right anterior hippocampus showed greater hemodynamic responses to predictive stimuli, providing evidence for implicit anticipation as a consequence of unsupervised statistical learning. Hippocampal anticipation based on predictive stimuli correlated with subsequent processing of the predicted stimuli in occipital and parietal cortex, and anticipation in additional brain regions correlated with facilitated object recognition as reflected in behavioral priming. Additional analyses suggested that implicit perceptual anticipation does not contribute to explicit familiarity, but can result in predictive potentiation of category-selective ventral visual cortex. Overall, these findings show that future-oriented processing can arise incidentally during the perception of statistical regularities.
我们的环境在对象彼此出现的时间和位置方面具有高度的规则性。统计学习使我们能够提取和表示这些规则，但大脑在持续感知过程中如何利用这些知识还不清楚。我们使用快速事件相关 fMRI 来测量在连续流中单个视觉图像的血流动力学反应，其中包含顺序关联。16 名人类观察者在执行无关认知任务的同时遇到了这些统计规律，而他们并不知道这些规律的存在。然而，右侧前海马体对预测性刺激表现出更大的血流动力学反应，为无意识的统计学习所产生的隐含预期提供了证据。基于预测性刺激的海马体预期与后续在枕叶和顶叶皮层中对预测性刺激的处理相关，并且在其他大脑区域中的预期与行为启动中反映的物体识别的促进相关。其他分析表明，隐含的知觉预期不会导致明确的熟悉感，但可以导致类别选择性腹侧视觉皮层的预测增强。总的来说，这些发现表明，在感知统计规律的过程中，面向未来的处理可以偶然出现。
