Department of Physiology of Cognitive Processes, Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics, , Tübingen 72076, Germany.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2014 Mar 17;369(1641):20130534. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0534. Print 2014 May 5.
The combination of electrophysiological recordings with ambiguous visual stimulation made possible the detection of neurons that represent the content of subjective visual perception and perceptual suppression in multiple cortical and subcortical brain regions. These neuronal populations, commonly referred to as the neural correlates of consciousness, are more likely to be found in the temporal and prefrontal cortices as well as the pulvinar, indicating that the content of perceptual awareness is represented with higher fidelity in higher-order association areas of the cortical and thalamic hierarchy, reflecting the outcome of competitive interactions between conflicting sensory information resolved in earlier stages. However, despite the significant insights into conscious perception gained through monitoring the activities of single neurons and small, local populations, the immense functional complexity of the brain arising from correlations in the activity of its constituent parts suggests that local, microscopic activity could only partially reveal the mechanisms involved in perceptual awareness. Rather, the dynamics of functional connectivity patterns on a mesoscopic and macroscopic level could be critical for conscious perception. Understanding these emergent spatio-temporal patterns could be informative not only for the stability of subjective perception but also for spontaneous perceptual transitions suggested to depend either on the dynamics of antagonistic ensembles or on global intrinsic activity fluctuations that may act upon explicit neural representations of sensory stimuli and induce perceptual reorganization. Here, we review the most recent results from local activity recordings and discuss the potential role of effective, correlated interactions during perceptual awareness.
电生理记录与模棱两可的视觉刺激相结合，使得检测代表主观视觉感知和知觉抑制内容的神经元成为可能，这些神经元存在于多个皮质和皮质下脑区。这些神经元群体通常被称为意识的神经相关物，更可能存在于颞叶和前额叶皮质以及丘脑枕中，这表明知觉意识的内容在皮质和丘脑等级的高级联想区域中以更高的保真度来表示，反映了在早期阶段解决的冲突感觉信息之间竞争相互作用的结果。然而，尽管通过监测单个神经元和小的局部神经元群体的活动，对意识感知有了重大的了解，但由于其组成部分的活动之间存在相关性，大脑的巨大功能复杂性表明，局部的微观活动只能部分揭示涉及知觉意识的机制。相反，在中观和宏观层面上功能连接模式的动态可能对意识感知至关重要。理解这些涌现的时空模式不仅对主观感知的稳定性很重要，而且对依赖于拮抗集合的动力学或全局内在活动波动的自发感知转变也很重要，这些波动可能作用于感觉刺激的明确神经表示，并诱导感知重组。在这里，我们回顾了来自局部活动记录的最新结果，并讨论了在意识感知过程中有效、相关的相互作用的潜在作用。
