Wyatte Dean, Herd Seth, Mingus Brian, O'Reilly Randall
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder Boulder, CO, USA.
Front Psychol. 2012 Jun 18;3:182. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00182. eCollection 2012.
How does the brain bind together visual features that are processed concurrently by different neurons into a unified percept suitable for processes such as object recognition? Here, we describe how simple, commonly accepted principles of neural processing can interact over time to solve the brain's binding problem. We focus on mechanisms of neural inhibition and top-down feedback. Specifically, we describe how inhibition creates competition among neural populations that code different features, effectively suppressing irrelevant information, and thus minimizing illusory conjunctions. Top-down feedback contributes to binding in a similar manner, but by reinforcing relevant features. Together, inhibition and top-down feedback contribute to a competitive environment that ensures only the most appropriate features are bound together. We demonstrate this overall proposal using a biologically realistic neural model of vision that processes features across a hierarchy of interconnected brain areas. Finally, we argue that temporal synchrony plays only a limited role in binding - it does not simultaneously bind multiple objects, but does aid in creating additional contrast between relevant and irrelevant features. Thus, our overall theory constitutes a solution to the binding problem that relies only on simple neural principles without any binding-specific processes.
大脑是如何将由不同神经元同时处理的视觉特征结合在一起，形成一个适用于物体识别等过程的统一感知的呢？在这里，我们描述了神经处理的简单、公认原则是如何随着时间相互作用来解决大脑的绑定问题的。我们关注神经抑制和自上而下反馈的机制。具体来说，我们描述了抑制如何在编码不同特征的神经群体之间产生竞争，有效地抑制无关信息，从而将虚幻结合最小化。自上而下的反馈以类似的方式促进绑定，但通过强化相关特征来实现。抑制和自上而下的反馈共同促成了一个竞争环境，确保只有最合适的特征被结合在一起。我们使用一个生物现实的视觉神经模型来演示这一总体提议，该模型在相互连接的大脑区域层次结构中处理特征。最后，我们认为时间同步在绑定中只起有限的作用——它不会同时绑定多个物体，但确实有助于在相关和无关特征之间创造额外的对比度。因此，我们的总体理论构成了一个仅依赖于简单神经原则而无需任何特定绑定过程的绑定问题解决方案。
