Iordan Coraline Rinn, Ritvo Victoria J H, Norman Kenneth A, Turk-Browne Nicholas B, Cohen Jonathan D
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627.
Department of Neuroscience, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14642.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Dec 10;121(50):e2410445121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2410445121. Epub 2024 Dec 3.
Learning requires changing the brain. This typically occurs through experience, study, or instruction. We report an alternate route for humans to acquire visual knowledge, through the direct sculpting of activity patterns in the human brain that mirror those expected to arise through learning. We used neurofeedback from closed-loop real-time functional MRI to create new categories of visual objects in the brain, without the participants' explicit awareness. After neural sculpting, participants exhibited behavioral and neural biases for the learned, but not for the control categories. The ability to sculpt new perceptual distinctions into the human brain offers a noninvasive research paradigm for causal testing of the link between neural representations and behavior. As such, beyond its current application to perception, our work potentially has broad relevance for advancing understanding in other domains of cognition such as decision-making, memory, and motor control.
学习需要改变大脑。这通常通过经验、学习或指导来实现。我们报告了一条人类获取视觉知识的替代途径，即通过直接塑造人类大脑中的活动模式，使其与预期通过学习产生的模式相匹配。我们利用来自闭环实时功能磁共振成像的神经反馈，在参与者没有明确意识的情况下，在大脑中创建新的视觉对象类别。经过神经塑造后，参与者对所学类别表现出行为和神经偏好，而对控制类别则没有。在人脑中塑造新的感知差异的能力为因果检验神经表征与行为之间的联系提供了一种非侵入性研究范式。因此，除了目前在感知方面的应用之外，我们的工作可能对推进决策、记忆和运动控制等其他认知领域的理解具有广泛的相关性。
