Yang Jiale, Watanabe Junji, Kanazawa So, Nishida Shin'ya, Yamaguchi Masami K
Department of Psychology, Chuo University, Hachioji, Tokyo, Japan.
NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Atsugi, Kanagawa, Japan.
J Vis. 2015 Jan 26;15(1):15.1.25. doi: 10.1167/15.1.25.
Whereas early visual processing has been considered primarily retinotopic, recent studies have revealed significant contributions of nonretinotopic processing to the human perception of fundamental visual features. For adult vision, it has been shown that information about color, shape, and size is nonretinotipically integrated along the motion trajectory, which could bring about clear and unblurred perception of a moving object. Since this nonretinotopic processing presumably includes tight and elaborated cooperation among functional cortical modules for different visual attributes, how this processing matures in the course of brain development is an important unexplored question. Here we show that the nonretinotopic integration of color signals is fully developed in infants at five months of age. Using preferential looking, we found significantly better temporal segregation of colors for moving patterns than for flickering patterns, even when the retinal color alternation rate was the same. This effect could be ascribed to the integration of color signals along a motion trajectory. Furthermore, the infants' color segmentation performance was comparable to that of human adults. Given that both the motion processing and color vision of 5-month-old infants are still under development, our findings suggest that nonretinotopic color processing develops concurrently with basic color and motion processing. Our findings not only support the notion of an early presence of cross-modal interactions in the brain, but also indicate the early development of a purposive cross-module interaction for elegant visual computation.
虽然早期视觉处理主要被认为是视网膜拓扑的，但最近的研究表明，非视网膜拓扑处理对人类对基本视觉特征的感知有重大贡献。对于成人视觉，研究表明，颜色、形状和大小的信息是沿着运动轨迹进行非视网膜拓扑整合的，这可以使对移动物体的感知清晰且不模糊。由于这种非视网膜拓扑处理可能包括不同视觉属性的功能性皮质模块之间紧密而精细的协作，因此这种处理在大脑发育过程中如何成熟是一个尚未探索的重要问题。在这里，我们表明五个月大的婴儿的颜色信号非视网膜拓扑整合已经完全发育。通过优先注视，我们发现即使视网膜颜色交替率相同，对于移动模式的颜色时间分离也明显优于闪烁模式。这种效应可以归因于沿着运动轨迹的颜色信号整合。此外，婴儿的颜色分割表现与成年人相当。鉴于五个月大婴儿的运动处理和颜色视觉仍在发育中，我们的研究结果表明非视网膜拓扑颜色处理与基本颜色和运动处理同时发展。我们的研究结果不仅支持大脑中早期存在跨模态相互作用的观点，还表明了用于优雅视觉计算的有目的跨模块相互作用的早期发展。
