Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Physiology, Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, 26 Innovation Walk, Clayton, VIC, 3800, Australia.
ARC Centre of Excellence in Integrative Brain Function, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia.
Sci Rep. 2022 Mar 29;12(1):5335. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-09367-7.
Humans demonstrate behavioural advantages (biases) towards particular dimensions (colour or shape of visual objects), but such biases are significantly altered in neuropsychological disorders. Recent studies have shown that lesions in the prefrontal cortex do not abolish dimensional biases, and therefore suggest that such biases might not depend on top-down prefrontal-mediated attention and instead emerge as bottom-up processing advantages. We hypothesised that if dimensional biases merely emerge from an enhancement of object features, the presence of visual objects would be necessary for the manifestation of dimensional biases. In a specifically-designed working memory task, in which macaque monkeys and humans performed matching based on the object memory rather than the actual object, we found significant dimensional biases in both species, which appeared as a shorter response time and higher accuracy in the preferred dimension (colour and shape dimension in humans and monkeys, respectively). Moreover, the mnemonic demands of the task influenced the magnitude of dimensional bias. Our findings in two primate species indicate that the dichotomy of top-down and bottom-up processing does not fully explain the emergence of dimensional biases. Instead, dimensional biases may emerge when processed information regarding visual object features interact with mnemonic and executive functions to guide goal-directed behaviour.
人类在特定维度（视觉对象的颜色或形状）上表现出行为优势（偏差），但这种偏差在神经心理障碍中会发生显著改变。最近的研究表明，前额叶皮层的损伤并不会消除维度偏差，因此表明这种偏差可能不依赖于自上而下的前额叶介导的注意力，而是作为自下而上的处理优势出现。我们假设，如果维度偏差仅仅是由于对象特征的增强而出现，那么视觉对象的存在对于维度偏差的表现是必要的。在一项专门设计的工作记忆任务中，猕猴和人类根据物体记忆而不是实际物体进行匹配，我们发现这两种物种都存在显著的维度偏差，表现在偏好维度上的反应时间更短，准确性更高（人类和猴子分别为颜色和形状维度）。此外，任务的记忆需求影响了维度偏差的大小。我们在两种灵长类动物中的发现表明，自上而下和自下而上处理的二分法并不能完全解释维度偏差的出现。相反，当关于视觉对象特征的处理信息与记忆和执行功能相互作用以指导目标导向行为时，维度偏差可能会出现。
