Chang Raymond, Baria Alexis T, Flounders Matthew W, He Biyu J
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA; Cornell University Weill Medical College, New York, NY 10065, USA.
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA; Northwestern University Feinberg, School of Medicine, Chicago, IL 60611, USA.
Neurosci Conscious. 2016 Jan;2016(1). doi: 10.1093/nc/niw008. Epub 2016 Jul 4.
Increasing evidence over the past decade suggests that vision is not simply a passive, feed-forward process in which cortical areas relay progressively more abstract information to those higher up in the visual hierarchy, but rather an inferential process with top-down processes actively guiding and shaping perception. However, one major question that persists is whether such processes can be influenced by unconsciously perceived stimuli. Recent psychophysics and neuroimaging studies have revealed that while consciously perceived stimuli elicit stronger responses in higher visual and frontoparietal areas than those that fail to reach conscious awareness, the latter can still drive high-level brain and behavioral responses. We investigated whether unconscious processing of a masked natural image could facilitate subsequent conscious recognition of its degraded counterpart (a black-and-white "Mooney" image) presented many seconds later. We found that this is indeed the case, suggesting that conscious vision may be influenced by priors established by unconscious processing of a fleeting image.
在过去十年中，越来越多的证据表明，视觉并非简单的被动前馈过程，即皮层区域将越来越抽象的信息逐步传递给视觉层级中更高层次的区域，而是一个推理过程，自上而下的过程积极引导和塑造感知。然而，一个仍然存在的主要问题是，这样的过程是否会受到无意识感知刺激的影响。最近的心理物理学和神经成像研究表明，虽然有意识感知的刺激在高级视觉和额顶叶区域引发的反应比那些未能达到意识觉知的刺激更强，但后者仍然可以驱动高级大脑和行为反应。我们研究了对一个掩蔽自然图像的无意识加工是否能够促进随后对许多秒后呈现的其模糊对应物（黑白“穆尼”图像）的有意识识别。我们发现情况确实如此，这表明有意识视觉可能会受到对一个短暂图像的无意识加工所建立的先验信息的影响。
