Content-Specific Expectations Enhance Stimulus Detectability by Increasing Perceptual Sensitivity
Content-Specific Expectations Enhance Stimulus Detectability by Increasing Perceptual Sensitivity
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DOI：
10.1037/xge0000109
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发表时间：
2015-12-01
影响因子：
4.1
通讯作者：
Peelen, Marius V.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Stein, Timo;Peelen, Marius V.
在我们的视觉环境中，物体的可探测性主要取决于物体的低水平视觉显著性，这是由物体及其周围环境的物理特性产生的。在本研究中，我们证明了物体可检测性还受到内部产生的对物体属性的期望的影响，并且这些影响是由感知敏感性的变化介导的。使用连续闪光抑制（CFS）使物体不可见，我们发现在刺激呈现之前提供关于物体类别隶属度的有效信息（例如，“汽车”）促进了对物体的意识，这表明相对于无信息基线条件和无效先验信息条件的定位性能有所提高。实验2和3表明，期望对检测的影响推广到双眼观看条件下，有效的类别线索有助于定位和检测短暂呈现的物体。实验4将这些结果扩展到简单刺激（定向Gabor补丁），有效的定向信息提高了定位性能。最后，在实验5中，我们发现期望对检测和定位性能的影响部分反映了感知敏感性的增加，有效提示刺激的对比度检测阈值相对于无提示和无效提示刺激降低。总之，这些发现表明，关于特定对象属性的先验信息动态地增强了视觉输入与预期内容匹配的有效信号，从而使对象检测偏向于预期对象。
The detectability of an object in our visual environment is primarily determined by the object's low-level visual salience, resulting from the physical characteristics of the object and its surroundings. In the present study we demonstrate that object detectability is additionally influenced by internally generated expectations about object properties, and that these influences are mediated by changes in perceptual sensitivity. Using continuous flash suppression (CFS) to render objects invisible, we found that providing valid information about the category membership of the object (e.g., "car") before stimulus presentation facilitated awareness of the object, as shown by improved localization performance relative to a noninformative baseline condition and to a condition with invalid prior information. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that the effect of expectation on detection generalized to binocular viewing conditions, with valid category cues facilitating the localization and detection of briefly presented objects. Experiment 4 extended these results to simple stimuli (oriented Gabor patches), for which valid orientation information improved localization performance. Finally, in Experiment 5 we found that the effect of expectation on detection and localization performance partly reflects increased perceptual sensitivity, as evidenced by decreased contrast detection thresholds for validly cued stimuli relative to noncued and invalidly cued stimuli. Together, these findings demonstrate that prior information about specific object properties dynamically enhances the effective signal of visual input matching the expected content, thereby biasing object detection in favor of expected objects.