Reber Thomas P, Luechinger Roger, Boesiger Peter, Henke Katharina
Department of Psychology, University of Bern , Bern , Switzerland ; Center for Cognition, Learning and Memory, University of Bern , Bern , Switzerland.
Institute for Biomedical Engineering, ETH Zurich , Zurich , Switzerland.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2014 Jan 22;8:9. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00009. eCollection 2014.
Analogies may arise from the conscious detection of similarities between a present and a past situation. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we tested whether young volunteers would detect analogies unconsciously between a current supraliminal (visible) and a past subliminal (invisible) situation. The subliminal encoding of the past situation precludes awareness of analogy detection in the current situation. First, participants encoded subliminal pairs of unrelated words in either one or nine encoding trials. Later, they judged the semantic fit of supraliminally presented new words that either retained a previously encoded semantic relation ("analog") or not ("broken analog"). Words in analogs versus broken analogs were judged closer semantically, which indicates unconscious analogy detection. Hippocampal activity associated with subliminal encoding correlated with the behavioral measure of unconscious analogy detection. Analogs versus broken analogs were processed with reduced prefrontal but enhanced medial temporal activity. We conclude that analogous episodes can be detected even unconsciously drawing on the episodic memory network.
类比可能源于对当前与过去情境之间相似性的有意识察觉。在这项功能磁共振成像研究中，我们测试了年轻志愿者是否会在当前阈上（可见）情境与过去阈下（不可见）情境之间无意识地察觉到类比。过去情境的阈下编码排除了在当前情境中对类比察觉的意识。首先，参与者在一或九次编码试验中对不相关单词的阈下对进行编码。之后，他们判断阈上呈现的新单词的语义契合度，这些新单词要么保留了先前编码的语义关系（“类比”），要么没有（“破坏的类比”）。与破坏的类比相比，类比中的单词在语义上被判断为更接近，这表明存在无意识的类比察觉。与阈下编码相关的海马体活动与无意识类比察觉的行为测量相关。与破坏的类比相比，类比在处理时前额叶活动减少但内侧颞叶活动增强。我们得出结论，即使利用情景记忆网络，类比事件也能被无意识地检测到。
