Parr Thomas, Corcoran Andrew W, Friston Karl J, Hohwy Jakob
Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, University College London, Institute of Neurology, 12 Queen Square, London, UK.
Cognition & Philosophy Laboratory, Department of Philosophy, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
Neurosci Conscious. 2019 Sep 10;2019(1):niz012. doi: 10.1093/nc/niz012. eCollection 2019.
Perceptual awareness depends upon the way in which we engage with our sensorium. This notion is central to active inference, a theoretical framework that treats perception and action as inferential processes. This variational perspective on cognition formalizes the notion of perception as hypothesis testing and treats actions as experiments that are designed (in part) to gather evidence for or against alternative hypotheses. The common treatment of perception and action affords a useful interpretation of certain perceptual phenomena whose active component is often not acknowledged. In this article, we start by considering Troxler fading - the dissipation of a peripheral percept during maintenance of fixation, and its recovery during free (saccadic) exploration. This offers an important example of the failure to maintain a percept without actively interrogating a visual scene. We argue that this may be understood in terms of the accumulation of uncertainty about a hypothesized stimulus when free exploration is disrupted by experimental instructions or pathology. Once we take this view, we can generalize the idea of using bodily (oculomotor) action to resolve uncertainty to include the use of mental (attentional) actions for the same purpose. This affords a useful way to think about binocular rivalry paradigms, in which perceptual changes need not be associated with an overt movement.
感知意识取决于我们与感觉器官互动的方式。这一概念是主动推理的核心，主动推理是一个将感知和行动视为推理过程的理论框架。这种关于认知的变分观点将感知概念形式化为假设检验，并将行动视为（部分）旨在收集支持或反对替代假设证据的实验。对感知和行动的共同处理为某些感知现象提供了一种有用的解释，而这些现象的主动成分往往未得到认可。在本文中，我们首先考虑特罗克斯勒消退现象——在注视保持过程中周边感知的消散，以及在自由（扫视）探索过程中的恢复。这提供了一个重要的例子，说明在没有积极审视视觉场景的情况下无法维持感知。我们认为，当自由探索因实验指令或病理状况而中断时，这可以从关于假设刺激的不确定性积累的角度来理解。一旦我们持有这种观点，我们就可以将利用身体（动眼）行动来解决不确定性的想法推广到包括为同一目的使用心理（注意力）行动。这为思考双眼竞争范式提供了一种有用的方式，在这种范式中，感知变化不一定与明显的运动相关。
