Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, PR China; Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Province, Dalian, PR China.
Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, PR China; Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Province, Dalian, PR China.
Cognition. 2023 Jan;230:105305. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105305. Epub 2022 Oct 10.
Threat has long been supposed to affect human cognitive processing including visual size perception. Whether such threat-related modulation effect varies as a function of spatial frequency is largely unexplored. Here we used low- or high-pass filtered threatening animal and fearful face images as primes and measured their effects on the processing of the Ebbinghaus illusion. Results showed that threatening-animal primes relative to neutral ones significantly decreased the illusion magnitude in low-spatial-frequency rather than in high-spatial-frequency ranges. However, fearful- and neutral-face primes had a comparable effect on the illusion magnitude in both spatial frequency ranges. Notably, when inhibitory transcranial magnetic stimulation was applied to the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), fearful-face primes significantly decreased the illusion magnitude in low-spatial-frequency rather than in high-spatial-frequency ranges. However, the opposite pattern of results was observed with right TPJ stimulation. The findings suggest that threat shapes basic aspects of visual perception in a spatial frequency-specific manner, possibly via magnocellular projections from both subcortical and cortical fear-processing systems to early visual cortex.
威胁一直被认为会影响人类的认知加工，包括视觉大小感知。然而，这种与威胁相关的调制效应是否随空间频率而变化，在很大程度上还没有得到探索。在这里，我们使用低通或高通滤波的威胁性动物和恐惧面孔图像作为启动刺激，并测量它们对艾宾浩斯错觉处理的影响。结果表明，与中性刺激相比，威胁性动物刺激在低空间频率而不是高空间频率范围内显著降低了错觉幅度。然而，恐惧和中性面孔刺激对两种空间频率范围内的错觉幅度都有类似的影响。值得注意的是，当应用抑制性经颅磁刺激于左颞顶联合区（TPJ）时，恐惧面孔刺激在低空间频率范围内显著降低了错觉幅度，而不是在高空间频率范围内。然而，右 TPJ 刺激则观察到相反的结果模式。这些发现表明，威胁以空间频率特异性的方式塑造了视觉感知的基本方面，可能是通过从中脑和皮层的恐惧处理系统到早期视觉皮层的大细胞投射来实现的。
