1 Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.
2 Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology.
Psychol Sci. 2018 Jun;29(6):926-935. doi: 10.1177/0956797617748959. Epub 2018 Apr 10.
Can what we imagine in our minds change how we perceive the world in the future? A continuous process of multisensory integration and recalibration is responsible for maintaining a correspondence between the senses (e.g., vision, touch, audition) and, ultimately, a stable and coherent perception of our environment. This process depends on the plasticity of our sensory systems. The so-called ventriloquism aftereffect-a shift in the perceived localization of sounds presented alone after repeated exposure to spatially mismatched auditory and visual stimuli-is a clear example of this type of plasticity in the audiovisual domain. In a series of six studies with 24 participants each, we investigated an imagery-induced ventriloquism aftereffect in which imagining a visual stimulus elicits the same frequency-specific auditory aftereffect as actually seeing one. These results demonstrate that mental imagery can recalibrate the senses and induce the same cross-modal sensory plasticity as real sensory stimuli.
我们在脑海中想象的东西能改变我们未来对世界的感知吗？一种持续的多感觉整合和再校准过程负责维持感觉（例如视觉、触觉、听觉）之间的对应关系，并最终对我们的环境产生稳定而一致的感知。这个过程取决于我们的感觉系统的可塑性。所谓的腹语效后——在反复暴露于空间不匹配的听觉和视觉刺激后，单独呈现的声音感知定位的转移——是这种听觉-视觉领域可塑性的一个明显例子。在一系列 6 项研究中，每项研究有 24 名参与者，我们研究了一种想象引起的腹语效后效应，即想象一个视觉刺激会引起与实际看到一个相同的特定频率的听觉后效。这些结果表明，心理意象可以重新校准感觉，并诱导与真实感觉刺激相同的跨感觉可塑性。
