Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6525 HR, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Cognitive Psychology Unit, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, 2333 AK Leiden, the Netherlands.
Cereb Cortex. 2021 Oct 22;31(12):5354-5362. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhab163.
Humans have a remarkable capacity to arrange and rearrange perceptual input according to different categorizations. This begs the question whether the categorization is exclusively a higher visual or amodal process, or whether categorization processes influence early visual areas as well. To investigate this we scanned healthy participants in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner during a conceptual decision task in which participants had to answer questions about upcoming images of animals. Early visual cortices (V1 and V2) contained information about the current visual input, about the granularity of the forthcoming categorical decision, as well as perceptual expectations about the upcoming visual stimulus. The middle temporal gyrus, the anterior temporal lobe, and the inferior frontal gyrus were also involved in the categorization process, constituting an attention and control network that modulates perceptual processing. These findings provide further evidence that early visual processes are driven by conceptual expectations and task demands.
人类具有根据不同分类重新排列和重新组织感知输入的非凡能力。这就引出了一个问题，即分类是否仅仅是一个更高的视觉或无模态过程，或者分类过程是否也会影响早期的视觉区域。为了研究这个问题，我们在磁共振成像扫描仪中扫描了健康的参与者，他们在一个概念决策任务中回答了关于即将出现的动物图像的问题。早期的视觉皮层（V1 和 V2）包含了关于当前视觉输入的信息，关于即将到来的分类决策的粒度，以及对即将出现的视觉刺激的感知期望。中颞叶、前颞叶和下额叶也参与了分类过程，构成了一个注意力和控制网络，调节着感知处理。这些发现进一步证明，早期的视觉过程是由概念期望和任务需求驱动的。
