Baror Shira, He Biyu J
Neuroscience Institute, New York University School of Medicine, 435 E 30th Street, New York, NY 10016, USA.
Neurosci Conscious. 2021 Aug 4;2021(2):niab016. doi: 10.1093/nc/niab016. eCollection 2021.
Flipping through social media feeds, viewing exhibitions in a museum, or walking through the botanical gardens, people consistently choose to engage with and disengage from visual content. Yet, in most laboratory settings, the visual stimuli, their presentation duration, and the task at hand are all controlled by the researcher. Such settings largely overlook the spontaneous nature of human visual experience, in which perception takes place independently from specific task constraints and its time course is determined by the observer as a self-governing agent. Currently, much remains unknown about how spontaneous perceptual experiences unfold in the brain. Are all perceptual categories extracted during spontaneous perception? Does spontaneous perception inherently involve volition? Is spontaneous perception segmented into discrete episodes? How do different neural networks interact over time during spontaneous perception? These questions are imperative to understand our conscious visual experience in daily life. In this article we propose a framework for spontaneous perception. We first define spontaneous perception as a task-free and self-paced experience. We propose that spontaneous perception is guided by four organizing principles that grant it temporal and spatial structures. These principles include coarse-to-fine processing, continuity and segmentation, agency and volition, and associative processing. We provide key suggestions illustrating how these principles may interact with one another in guiding the multifaceted experience of spontaneous perception. We point to testable predictions derived from this framework, including (but not limited to) the roles of the default-mode network and slow cortical potentials in underlying spontaneous perception. We conclude by suggesting several outstanding questions for future research, extending the relevance of this framework to consciousness and spontaneous brain activity. In conclusion, the spontaneous perception framework proposed herein integrates components in human perception and cognition, which have been traditionally studied in isolation, and opens the door to understand how visual perception unfolds in its most natural context.
翻阅社交媒体动态、在博物馆参观展览或漫步于植物园时，人们不断地选择与视觉内容进行互动或脱离。然而，在大多数实验室环境中，视觉刺激、其呈现持续时间以及手头的任务均由研究人员控制。此类环境在很大程度上忽视了人类视觉体验的自发性，在这种自发性中，感知独立于特定任务限制而发生，并且其时间进程由观察者作为自主主体来决定。目前，关于自发感知体验在大脑中如何展开仍有许多未知之处。在自发感知过程中是否提取了所有感知类别？自发感知是否本质上涉及意志？自发感知是否被分割为离散的片段？在自发感知过程中，不同神经网络如何随时间相互作用？这些问题对于理解我们日常生活中的有意识视觉体验至关重要。在本文中，我们提出了一个自发感知框架。我们首先将自发感知定义为一种无任务且自主节奏的体验。我们提出，自发感知由赋予其时间和空间结构的四个组织原则所引导。这些原则包括从粗到细处理、连续性和分割、能动性和意志以及联想处理。我们提供了关键建议，说明这些原则在引导自发感知的多方面体验时可能如何相互作用。我们指出了从该框架得出的可测试预测,包括（但不限于）默认模式网络和慢皮层电位在基础自发感知中的作用。我们通过提出几个未来研究的突出问题来得出结论，将该框架的相关性扩展到意识和自发脑活动。总之，本文提出的自发感知框架整合了人类感知和认知中传统上孤立研究的组成部分，并为理解视觉感知在其最自然的背景下如何展开打开了大门。
