Emberson L L
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States.
Adv Child Dev Behav. 2017;52:1-41. doi: 10.1016/bs.acdb.2016.10.001. Epub 2017 Feb 7.
Perceptual development requires infants to adapt their perceptual systems to the structures and statistical information of their environment. In this way, perceptual development is not only important in its own right, but is a case study for behavioral and neural plasticity-powerful mechanisms that have the potential to support developmental change in numerous domains starting early in life. While it is widely assumed that perceptual development is a bottom-up process, where simple exposure to sensory input modifies perceptual representations starting early in the perceptual system, there are several critical phenomena in this literature that cannot be explained with an exclusively bottom-up model. This chapter proposes a complementary mechanism where nascent top-down information, feeding back from higher-level regions of the brain, helps to guide perceptual development. Supporting this theoretical proposal, recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies have established that young infants already have the capacity to engage in top-down modulation of their perceptual systems.
感知发展要求婴儿使其感知系统适应其环境的结构和统计信息。通过这种方式，感知发展不仅本身很重要，而且是行为和神经可塑性的一个案例研究——这些强大的机制有可能支持从生命早期开始的众多领域的发育变化。虽然人们普遍认为感知发展是一个自下而上的过程，即简单地接触感觉输入就会从感知系统早期开始修改感知表征，但该文献中有几个关键现象无法用完全自下而上的模型来解释。本章提出了一种互补机制，即从大脑较高层次区域反馈的新生自上而下信息有助于指导感知发展。支持这一理论提议的是，最近的行为和神经成像研究已经证实，幼儿已经具备对其感知系统进行自上而下调节的能力。
