Wood Justin N
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, USA.
Dev Sci. 2015 Mar;18(2):194-205. doi: 10.1111/desc.12198. Epub 2014 Jun 30.
How does object recognition emerge in the newborn brain? To address this question, I examined the information content of the first visual object representation built by newly hatched chicks (Gallus gallus). In their first week of life, chicks were raised in controlled-rearing chambers that contained a single virtual object rotating around a single axis. In their second week of life, I tested whether subjects had encoded information about the identity and viewpoint of the virtual object. The results showed that chicks built object representations that contained both object identity information and view-specific information. However, there was a trade-off between these two types of information: subjects who were more sensitive to identity information were less sensitive to view-specific information, and vice versa. This pattern of results is predicted by iterative, hierarchically organized visual processing machinery, the machinery that supports object recognition in adult primates. More generally, this study shows that invariant object recognition is a core cognitive ability that can be operational at the onset of visual object experience.
物体识别是如何在新生大脑中出现的？为了解决这个问题，我研究了刚孵出的小鸡（原鸡）构建的第一个视觉物体表征的信息内容。在它们出生后的第一周，小鸡被饲养在可控饲养箱中，箱内有一个围绕单轴旋转的虚拟物体。在它们出生后的第二周，我测试了这些受试小鸡是否编码了关于虚拟物体的身份和视角的信息。结果表明，小鸡构建的物体表征包含物体身份信息和特定视角信息。然而，这两种信息之间存在权衡：对身份信息更敏感的受试小鸡对特定视角信息的敏感度较低，反之亦然。这种结果模式是由迭代的、层次组织的视觉处理机制预测的，这种机制支持成年灵长类动物的物体识别。更普遍地说，这项研究表明，不变物体识别是一种核心认知能力，在视觉物体体验开始时就可以发挥作用。
