Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Elife. 2019 Aug 23;8:e47869. doi: 10.7554/eLife.47869.
Perception and behavior can be guided by predictions, which are often based on learned statistical regularities. Neural responses to expected stimuli are frequently found to be attenuated after statistical learning. However, whether this sensory attenuation following statistical learning occurs automatically or depends on attention remains unknown. In the present fMRI study, we exposed human volunteers to sequentially presented object stimuli, in which the first object predicted the identity of the second object. We observed a reliable attenuation of neural activity for expected compared to unexpected stimuli in the ventral visual stream. Crucially, this sensory attenuation was only apparent when stimuli were attended, and vanished when attention was directed away from the predictable objects. These results put important constraints on neurocomputational theories that cast perception as a process of probabilistic integration of prior knowledge and sensory information.
感知和行为可以受到预测的引导，而预测通常基于学习到的统计规律。人们经常发现，在进行统计学习后，对预期刺激的神经反应会减弱。然而，这种在统计学习后产生的感觉衰减是自动发生的，还是依赖于注意力，目前尚不清楚。在本 fMRI 研究中，我们让人类志愿者观看依次呈现的物体刺激，其中第一个物体预测了第二个物体的身份。我们观察到在腹侧视觉流中，与预期刺激相比，对意外刺激的神经活动有明显的衰减。至关重要的是，只有当刺激受到关注时，这种感觉衰减才会显现出来，而当注意力从可预测的物体上转移开时，这种衰减就会消失。这些结果对将感知视为先前知识和感觉信息的概率整合过程的神经计算理论提出了重要的限制。
