Sherman M T, Seth A K, Barrett A B, Kanai R
School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer BN1 9QH, UK; Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Falmer BN1 9QJ, UK.
Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Falmer BN1 9QJ, UK; Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Falmer BN1 9QJ, UK.
Conscious Cogn. 2015 Sep;35:53-65. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2015.04.015. Epub 2015 May 16.
The influential framework of 'predictive processing' suggests that prior probabilistic expectations influence, or even constitute, perceptual contents. This notion is evidenced by the facilitation of low-level perceptual processing by expectations. However, whether expectations can facilitate high-level components of perception remains unclear. We addressed this question by considering the influence of expectations on perceptual metacognition. To isolate the effects of expectation from those of attention we used a novel factorial design: expectation was manipulated by changing the probability that a Gabor target would be presented; attention was manipulated by instructing participants to perform or ignore a concurrent visual search task. We found that, independently of attention, metacognition improved when yes/no responses were congruent with expectations of target presence/absence. Results were modeled under a novel Bayesian signal detection theoretic framework which integrates bottom-up signal propagation with top-down influences, to provide a unified description of the mechanisms underlying perceptual decision and metacognition.
“预测性处理”这一有影响力的框架表明，先前的概率期望会影响甚至构成感知内容。期望对低层次感知处理的促进作用证明了这一概念。然而，期望是否能促进感知的高层次成分仍不清楚。我们通过考虑期望对感知元认知的影响来解决这个问题。为了将期望的影响与注意力的影响区分开来，我们采用了一种新颖的析因设计：通过改变呈现Gabor目标的概率来操纵期望；通过指示参与者执行或忽略同时进行的视觉搜索任务来操纵注意力。我们发现，与注意力无关，当“是/否”反应与目标存在/不存在的期望一致时，元认知会得到改善。结果在一个新颖的贝叶斯信号检测理论框架下进行建模，该框架将自下而上的信号传播与自上而下的影响相结合，以统一描述感知决策和元认知背后的机制。
