Roach Neil W, McGraw Paul V, Whitaker David J, Heron James
Visual Neuroscience Group, School of Psychology, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom;
Visual Neuroscience Group, School of Psychology, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Jan 10;114(2):412-417. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1610706114. Epub 2016 Dec 22.
To enable effective interaction with the environment, the brain combines noisy sensory information with expectations based on prior experience. There is ample evidence showing that humans can learn statistical regularities in sensory input and exploit this knowledge to improve perceptual decisions and actions. However, fundamental questions remain regarding how priors are learned and how they generalize to different sensory and behavioral contexts. In principle, maintaining a large set of highly specific priors may be inefficient and restrict the speed at which expectations can be formed and updated in response to changes in the environment. However, priors formed by generalizing across varying contexts may not be accurate. Here, we exploit rapidly induced contextual biases in duration reproduction to reveal how these competing demands are resolved during the early stages of prior acquisition. We show that observers initially form a single prior by generalizing across duration distributions coupled with distinct sensory signals. In contrast, they form multiple priors if distributions are coupled with distinct motor outputs. Together, our findings suggest that rapid prior acquisition is facilitated by generalization across experiences of different sensory inputs but organized according to how that sensory information is acted on.
为了实现与环境的有效交互，大脑会将有噪声的感官信息与基于先前经验的预期相结合。有充分证据表明，人类能够学习感官输入中的统计规律，并利用这些知识来改善感知决策和行动。然而，关于先验知识是如何习得的，以及它们如何推广到不同的感官和行为情境中，仍然存在一些基本问题。原则上，维持大量高度特定的先验知识可能效率低下，并限制了根据环境变化形成和更新预期的速度。然而，通过在不同情境中进行泛化而形成的先验知识可能并不准确。在这里，我们利用持续时间再现中快速诱导的情境偏差，来揭示在先前知识获取的早期阶段，这些相互竞争的需求是如何得到解决的。我们表明，观察者最初通过对与不同感官信号相结合的持续时间分布进行泛化，形成单一的先验知识。相比之下，如果分布与不同的运动输出相结合，他们会形成多个先验知识。总之，我们的研究结果表明，通过对不同感官输入的经验进行泛化，有助于快速获取先验知识，但会根据感官信息的作用方式进行组织。
