Bartolomeo P, Bachoud-Lévi A C, De Gelder B, Denes G, Dalla Barba G, Brugières P, Degos J D
INSERM Unit 324, Centre Paul Broca, Paris, France.
Neuropsychologia. 1998 Mar;36(3):239-49. doi: 10.1016/s0028-3932(97)00103-6.
A brain-damaged patient is described whose pattern of performance provides insight into both the functional mechanisms and the neural structures involved in visual mental imagery. The patient became severely agnosic, alexic, achromatopsic and prosopagnosic following bilateral brain lesions in the temporo-occipital cortex. However, her mental imagery for the same visual entities that she could not perceive was perfectly preserved. This clear-cut dissociation held across all the major domains of high-level vision: object recognition, reading, colour and face processing. Our findings, together with other reports on domain-specific dissociations and functional brain imaging studies, provide evidence to support the view that visual perception and visual mental imagery are subserved by independent functional mechanisms, which do not share the same cortical implementation. In particular, our results suggest that mental imagery abilities need not be mediated by early visual cortices.
本文描述了一位脑损伤患者，其表现模式为研究视觉心理意象所涉及的功能机制和神经结构提供了线索。该患者在颞枕叶皮质发生双侧脑损伤后，出现了严重的失认症、失读症、色盲症和面孔失认症。然而，她对那些无法感知的相同视觉实体的心理意象却完好无损。这种明确的分离现象在高级视觉的所有主要领域都存在：物体识别、阅读、颜色和面部处理。我们的研究结果，连同其他关于特定领域分离和功能性脑成像研究的报告，为支持以下观点提供了证据：视觉感知和视觉心理意象由独立的功能机制所支持，这些机制不共享相同的皮质实现方式。特别是，我们的结果表明，心理意象能力不一定由早期视觉皮层介导。
