Arstila Valtteri
Department of Behavioral Sciences and Philosophy, University of Turku, 20014 Turku, Finland; Turku Brain and Mind Center, University of Turku, 20014 Turku, Finland.
Conscious Cogn. 2015 Dec 15;38:205-16. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2015.10.001. Epub 2015 Nov 4.
Postdiction effects are phenomena in which a stimulus influences the appearance of events taking place before it. In metacontrast masking, for instance, a masking stimulus can render a target stimulus shown before the mask invisible. This and other postdiction effects have been considered incompatible with a simple explanation according to which (i) our perceptual experiences are delayed for only the time it takes for a distal stimulus to reach our sensory receptors and for our neural mechanisms to process it, and (ii) the order in which the processing of stimuli is completed corresponds with the apparent temporal order of stimuli. As a result, the theories that account for more than a single postdiction effect reject at least one of these theses. This paper presents a new framework for the timing of experiences-the non-linear latency difference view-in which the three most discussed postdiction effects-apparent motion, the flash-lag effect, and metacontrast masking-can be accounted for while simultaneously holding theses (i) and (ii). This view is grounded in the local reentrant processes, which are known to have a crucial role in perception. Accordingly, the non-linear latency difference view is both more parsimonious and more empirically plausible than the competing theories, all of which remain largely silent about the neural implementation of the mechanisms they postulate.
后溯效应是指一种刺激影响在其之前发生的事件的呈现方式的现象。例如，在元对比掩蔽中，一个掩蔽刺激可以使在掩蔽之前呈现的目标刺激变得不可见。这种后溯效应以及其他后溯效应被认为与一种简单的解释不相容，该解释认为：（i）我们的感知体验仅在远端刺激到达我们的感觉感受器以及我们的神经机制对其进行处理所需的时间内被延迟；（ii）刺激处理完成的顺序与刺激的明显时间顺序相对应。因此，那些解释不止一种后溯效应的理论至少会摒弃其中一个论点。本文提出了一个关于体验时间的新框架——非线性延迟差异观点——在这个框架中，最常被讨论的三种后溯效应——表观运动、闪光滞后效应和元对比掩蔽——可以在同时持有论点（i）和（ii）的情况下得到解释。这种观点基于局部折返过程，而局部折返过程在感知中起着关键作用。因此，非线性延迟差异观点比其他竞争理论更简洁，也更符合经验事实，其他竞争理论在很大程度上对它们所假设机制的神经实现仍未作说明。
