Brain & Cognition Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, United Kingdom.
J Neurosci. 2011 Oct 19;31(42):14952-60. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5541-10.2011.
Human perception is highly flexible and adaptive. Selective processing is tuned dynamically according to current task goals and expectations to optimize behavior. Arguably, the major source of our expectations about events yet to unfold is our past experience; however, the ability of long-term memories to bias early perceptual analysis has remained untested. We used a noninvasive method with high temporal resolution to record neural activity while human participants detected visual targets that appeared at remembered versus novel locations within naturalistic visual scenes. Upon viewing a familiar scene, spatial memories changed oscillatory brain activity in anticipation of the target location. Memory also enhanced neural activity during early stages of visual analysis of the target and improved behavioral performance. Both measures correlated with subsequent target-detection performance. We therefore demonstrated that memory can directly enhance perceptual functions in the human brain.
人类的感知具有高度的灵活性和适应性。根据当前的任务目标和预期，选择性处理会动态调整，以优化行为。可以说，我们对尚未发生的事件的期望主要来源于我们的过往经验；然而，长期记忆影响早期感知分析的能力尚未得到验证。我们使用一种具有高时间分辨率的非侵入性方法，在人类参与者检测出现在自然视觉场景中记忆位置与新位置的视觉目标时，记录他们的神经活动。当参与者观看熟悉的场景时，空间记忆会改变对目标位置的预期的脑电波活动。记忆还增强了目标视觉分析早期阶段的神经活动，并提高了行为表现。这两个指标都与随后的目标检测表现相关。因此，我们证明了记忆可以直接增强人类大脑的感知功能。
