Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp.
Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit, Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2020 Sep;15(5):1200-1213. doi: 10.1177/1745691620924039. Epub 2020 Jul 16.
In recent years, researchers from independent subfields have begun to engage with the idea that the same cortical regions that contribute to on-line perception are recruited during and underlie off-line activities such as information maintenance in working memory, mental imagery, hallucinations, dreaming, and mind wandering. Accumulating evidence suggests that in all of these cases the activity of posterior brain regions provides the contents of experiences. This article is intended to move one step further by exploring specific links between the vividness of experiences, which is a characteristic feature of consciousness regardless of its actual content, and certain properties of the content-specific neural-activity patterns. Investigating the mechanisms that underlie mental imagery and its relation to working memory and the processes responsible for mind wandering and its similarities to dreaming form two clusters of research that are in the forefront of the recent scientific study of mental phenomena, yet communication between these two clusters has been surprisingly sparse. Here our aim is to foster such information exchange by articulating a hypothesis about the fine-grained phenomenological structure determining subjective vividness and its possible neural basis that allows us to shed new light on these mental phenomena by bringing them under a common framework.
近年来，来自独立子领域的研究人员开始接受这样一种观点，即在在线感知中起作用的相同皮质区域在离线活动中被招募，例如工作记忆中的信息维持、心理意象、幻觉、做梦和思维漫游。越来越多的证据表明，在所有这些情况下，大脑后部区域的活动提供了经验的内容。本文旨在更进一步，探索体验的生动性（无论其实际内容如何，这都是意识的一个特征）与特定的内容特异性神经活动模式之间的具体联系。研究想象的机制及其与工作记忆的关系以及负责思维漫游的过程及其与做梦的相似性是两个处于近期心理现象科学研究前沿的研究集群，但这两个集群之间的交流却出奇地稀少。在这里，我们的目的是通过阐明一个关于决定主观生动性的细粒度现象学结构及其可能的神经基础的假设来促进这种信息交流，该假设使我们能够通过将它们置于一个共同的框架下，为这些心理现象带来新的启示。
