Azañón Elena, Tucciarelli Raffaele, Siromahov Metodi, Amoruso Elena, Longo Matthew R
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, WC1E 7HX London, United Kingdom; Institute of Psychology, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany; Center for Behavioral Brain Sciences, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany; Department of Behavioral Neurology, Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, 39118 Magdeburg, Germany.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, WC1E 7HX London, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2020 May;198:104199. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104199. Epub 2020 Jan 31.
Categories provide a fundamental source of information used to structure our perception of the world. For example, when people reproduce the remembered location of a dot in a circle, they implicitly impose vertical and horizontal axes onto the circle, and responses are biased towards the center of each of the resulting quadrants. Such results reveal the existence of spatial prototypes, which function as Bayesian priors and which are integrated with actual memory traces. Spatial prototypes have been extensively investigated and described in previous studies, but it remains unclear what type of information is used to create spatial categories. We developed a new approach that allowed to 'image' patterns of spatial bias in detail, and map the internal representational structure of objects and space. Previous studies, using circular shapes suggested that boundaries are established based on a viewer-based frame of reference, therefore using cues extrinsic to the object. Given that a circle has radial symmetry, the axes imposed cannot come from the shape itself. Here we investigated if the same applies for shapes with clearly-defined symmetry axes and thus intrinsic frames of reference. Using rotated shapes (squares and rectangles), where extrinsic and intrinsic cues are dissociated, we observed flexible usage of multiple reference frames. Furthermore, in certain contexts, participants relied mostly on cues intrinsic to the shape itself. These results show that humans divide visual space as a function of multiple reference frames, in a flexible, and context dependent manner.
类别提供了用于构建我们对世界认知的基本信息来源。例如，当人们重现圆圈中一个点的记忆位置时，他们会隐含地将垂直和水平轴强加于圆圈上，并且反应会偏向于由此产生的每个象限的中心。此类结果揭示了空间原型的存在，其作为贝叶斯先验起作用，并与实际记忆痕迹相结合。空间原型在先前的研究中已得到广泛研究和描述，但尚不清楚使用何种类型的信息来创建空间类别。我们开发了一种新方法，该方法能够详细地“描绘”空间偏差模式，并绘制物体和空间的内部表征结构。先前使用圆形形状的研究表明，边界是基于以观察者为基础的参照系建立的，因此使用的是物体外部的线索。鉴于圆具有径向对称性，强加的轴不可能来自形状本身。在这里，我们研究了对于具有明确对称轴和因此具有内在参照系的形状是否也是如此。使用旋转的形状（正方形和矩形），其中外部和内部线索是分离的，我们观察到了多个参照系的灵活使用。此外，在某些情况下，参与者主要依赖于形状本身固有的线索。这些结果表明，人类以灵活且依赖于上下文的方式根据多个参照系划分视觉空间。
