Department of Psychology, IIPDM, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Department of Psychology, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Sci Rep. 2021 Apr 22;11(1):8759. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-88271-y.
Scientific investigations have long emphasized the cortex's role in cognitive transfer and arithmetic abilities. To date, however, this assumption has not been thoroughly empirically investigated. Here we demonstrated that primitive mechanisms-lower visual channels-have a causal role in cognitive transfer of complex skills such as symbolic arithmetic. We found that exposing only one monocular channel to a visuospatial training resulted in a larger transfer effect in the trained monocular channel compared to the untrained monocular channel. Such cognitive transfer was found for both novel figural-spatial problems (near transfer) and novel subtraction problems (far transfer). Importantly, the benefits of the trained eye were not observed in old problems and in other tasks that did not involve visuospatial abilities (the Stroop task, a multiplication task). These results challenge the exclusive role of the cortex in cognitive transfer and complex arithmetic. In addition, the results suggest a new mechanism for the emergence of cognitive skills, that could be shared across different species.
科学研究长期以来一直强调大脑皮层在认知迁移和计算能力方面的作用。然而，到目前为止，这一假设尚未得到充分的实证研究。在这里，我们证明了原始机制——较低的视觉通道——在复杂技能（如符号算术）的认知迁移中具有因果关系。我们发现，仅将一只眼睛暴露在视觉空间训练中，与未经训练的眼睛相比，在训练的眼睛中会产生更大的迁移效果。这种认知迁移既适用于新的图形-空间问题（近迁移），也适用于新的减法问题（远迁移）。重要的是，在旧问题和不涉及视觉空间能力的其他任务（斯特鲁普任务，乘法任务）中，没有观察到训练眼的益处。这些结果对认知迁移和复杂算术中皮层的作用提出了挑战。此外，这些结果为认知技能的出现提供了一种新的机制，这种机制可能在不同物种中共享。
