Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2012 Nov 8;6:305. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00305. eCollection 2012.
The present study tested the hypothesis that the effects of mental imagery on subsequent perception occur at a later matching stage in perceptual identification, but not in the early perceptual stage as in perceptual detection. The behavioral results suggested that the effect of visual imagery on visual identification is content-specific, i.e., imagining a congruent face facilitates face identification, whereas a mismatch between imagery and perception leads to an interference effect. More importantly, the ERP results revealed that a more negative N2 response to the subsequent visual face stimuli was elicited over fronto-central sites in the mismatch and no-imagery conditions as compared to that in the match condition, with the early P1 and N170 components independent of manipulations. The latency and distribution of the neural effects demonstrate that the matching step, but not the earlier perceptual process, is affected by the preceding visual imagery in the context of face identification. We discuss these results in a broader context that the imagery-perception interaction may depend on task demand.
本研究检验了这样一个假设，即心理意象对后续感知的影响发生在感知识别的后期匹配阶段，而不是在感知检测的早期感知阶段。行为结果表明，视觉意象对视觉识别的影响是特定内容的，即想象一个一致的面孔会促进面孔识别，而意象与感知之间的不匹配会导致干扰效应。更重要的是，ERP 结果显示，在不匹配和无想象条件下，与匹配条件相比，后续视觉面孔刺激在额中央部位引起更负的 N2 反应，而早期的 P1 和 N170 成分与操作无关。神经效应的潜伏期和分布表明，在面孔识别的背景下，是匹配步骤而不是早期的感知过程受到先前视觉意象的影响。我们在更广泛的背景下讨论这些结果，即意象-感知的相互作用可能取决于任务需求。
