Shimojo Shinsuke
Shimojo Psychophysics Laboratory, Division of Biology and Biological Engineering/Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology Pasadena, CA, USA.
Front Psychol. 2014 Mar 31;5:196. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00196. eCollection 2014.
There are a few postdictive perceptual phenomena known, in which a stimulus presented later seems causally to affect the percept of another stimulus presented earlier. While backward masking provides a classical example, the flash lag effect stimulates theorists with a variety of intriguing findings. The TMS-triggered scotoma together with "backward filling-in" of it offer a unique neuroscientific case. Findings suggest that various visual attributes are reorganized in a postdictive fashion to be consistent with each other, or to be consistent in a causality framework. In terms of the underlying mechanisms, four prototypical models have been considered: the "catch up," the "reentry," the "different pathway" and the "memory revision" models. By extending the list of postdictive phenomena to memory, sensory-motor and higher-level cognition, one may note that such a postdictive reconstruction may be a general principle of neural computation, ranging from milliseconds to months in a time scale, from local neuronal interactions to long-range connectivity, in the complex brain. The operational definition of the "postdictive phenomenon" can be applicable to such a wide range of sensory/cognitive effects across a wide range of time scale, even though the underlying neural mechanisms may vary across them. This has significant implications in interpreting "free will" and "sense of agency" in functional, psychophysical and neuroscientific terms.
已知有一些后向预测性感知现象，其中较晚呈现的刺激似乎会因果性地影响较早呈现的另一个刺激的感知。虽然反向掩蔽提供了一个经典例子，但闪光滞后效应的各种有趣发现激发了理论家的兴趣。经颅磁刺激引发的暗点及其“向后填充”提供了一个独特的神经科学案例。研究结果表明，各种视觉属性以一种后向预测的方式进行重组，以相互一致，或者在因果关系框架中保持一致。就潜在机制而言，已经考虑了四种典型模型：“追赶”模型、“再入”模型、“不同通路”模型和“记忆修正”模型。通过将后向预测现象的范围扩展到记忆、感觉运动和高级认知领域，人们可能会注意到，这种后向预测性重建可能是神经计算的一个普遍原则，在复杂大脑中，其时间尺度从毫秒到数月不等，范围从局部神经元相互作用到长程连接。“后向预测现象”的操作定义可以适用于如此广泛的时间尺度上的各种感觉/认知效应，尽管其潜在的神经机制可能各不相同。这在从功能、心理物理学和神经科学角度解释“自由意志”和“能动感”方面具有重要意义。
