Department of Psychology, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan.
Brain Cogn. 2011 Nov;77(2):292-7. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2011.07.008.
Participants made categorical or coordinate spatial judgments on the global or local elements of shapes. Stimuli were composed of a horizontal line and two dots. In the Categorical task, participants judged whether the line was above or below the dots. In the Coordinate task, they judged whether the line would fit between the dots. Stimuli were made hierarchical so that the global patterns composed of a "global line" made of local dots-and-line units, and "global dot" made of a single dots-and-line unit. The results indicated that the categorical task was better performed when participants attended to the local level of the hierarchical stimuli. On the other hand, the coordinate task was better performed when they attended to the global level. These findings are consistent with computer simulation models of the attentional modulation of neuronal receptive fields' size suggesting that (1) coordinate spatial relations are more efficiently encoded when one attends to a relatively large region of space, whereas (2) categorical spatial relations are more efficiently encoded when one attends to a relatively small region of space.
参与者对形状的全局或局部元素进行了类别或坐标空间判断。刺激由一条水平线和两个点组成。在类别任务中，参与者判断线是否在点的上方或下方。在坐标任务中，他们判断线是否会在点之间拟合。刺激是分层的，使得由“全局线”组成的全局模式由局部点线单元组成，以及由单个点线单元组成的“全局点”。结果表明，当参与者关注分层刺激的局部水平时，类别任务表现更好。另一方面，当他们关注全局水平时，坐标任务表现更好。这些发现与注意调节神经元感受野大小的计算机模拟模型一致，表明 (1) 当人们关注相对较大的空间区域时，坐标空间关系的编码效率更高，而 (2) 当人们关注相对较小的空间区域时，类别空间关系的编码效率更高。
