Nestmann Sophia, Karnath Hans-Otto, Rennig Johannes
Division of Neuropsychology, Center of Neurology, Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Division of Neuropsychology, Center of Neurology, Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany; Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, United States of America.
Neuroimage. 2022 May 1;251:119021. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119021. Epub 2022 Feb 19.
Object constancy is one of the most crucial mechanisms of the human visual system enabling viewpoint invariant object recognition. However, the neuronal foundations of object constancy are widely unknown. Research has shown that the ventral visual stream is involved in processing of various kinds of object stimuli and that several regions along the ventral stream are possibly sensitive to the orientation of an object in space. To systematically address the question of viewpoint sensitive object perception, we conducted a study with stroke patients as well as an fMRI experiment with healthy participants applying object stimuli in several spatial orientations, for example in typical and atypical viewing conditions. In the fMRI experiment, we found stronger BOLD signals and above-chance classification accuracies for objects presented in atypical viewing conditions in fusiform face sensitive and lateral occipito-temporal object preferring areas. In the behavioral patient study, we observed that lesions of the right fusiform gyrus were associated with lower performance in object recognition for atypical views. The complementary results from both experiments emphasize the contributions of fusiform and lateral-occipital areas to visual object constancy and indicate that visual object constancy is particularly enabled through increased neuronal activity and specific activation patterns for objects in demanding viewing conditions.
客体恒常性是人类视觉系统中最关键的机制之一，它使人们能够进行视角不变的客体识别。然而，客体恒常性的神经基础却鲜为人知。研究表明，腹侧视觉通路参与各种客体刺激的处理，并且沿着腹侧通路的几个区域可能对客体在空间中的方向敏感。为了系统地解决视角敏感的客体感知问题，我们对中风患者进行了一项研究，并对健康参与者进行了一项功能磁共振成像实验，在几种空间方向上应用客体刺激，例如在典型和非典型的观察条件下。在功能磁共振成像实验中，我们发现在梭状脸敏感区和枕颞外侧客体偏好区，非典型观察条件下呈现的客体具有更强的血氧水平依赖（BOLD）信号和高于机会水平的分类准确率。在行为学患者研究中，我们观察到右侧梭状回损伤与非典型视图的客体识别表现较差有关。两个实验的互补结果强调了梭状回和枕颞外侧区域对视觉客体恒常性的贡献，并表明视觉客体恒常性尤其通过在苛刻观察条件下客体的神经元活动增加和特定激活模式得以实现。
