Yu Xinchi
University of Maryland.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2025 May 2:1-15. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_02348.
We mentally represent all kinds of objects across a variety of tasks and source modalities (i.e., mental objects). Recent work has proposed that mental objects are represented by content-free, reassignable pointers (or indexicals, tokens) in our moment-to-moment processing. Are all mental objects represented by the same set of pointers? If not, where should we draw the lines between different kinds of pointers? In this Perspective, we propose a novel research program aiming at unraveling the neural taxonomy of mental objects by testing how the neural markers for pointers generalize across different paradigms, task goals, source modalities, and more.
在各种任务和信息来源方式（即心理对象）中，我们通过心理表征各种对象。最近的研究提出，在我们的即时处理过程中，心理对象由无内容、可重新分配的指针（或索引词、标记）来表征。所有心理对象都由同一组指针表征吗？如果不是，我们应该如何划分不同类型指针之间的界限？在这篇观点文章中，我们提出了一个新颖的研究计划，旨在通过测试指针的神经标记如何在不同范式、任务目标、信息来源方式等之间进行推广，来揭示心理对象的神经分类。
