Priming by the variability of visual information
Priming by the variability of visual information
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1308674111
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发表时间：
2014-05-27
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Summerfield, Christopher
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Michael, Elizabeth;de Gardelle, Vincent;Summerfield, Christopher
根据最近的理论，感知依赖于对感官环境的统计信息进行编码的总结表征。在这里，我们使用知觉启动来表征表征，调解一个复杂的视觉阵列的分类。观察者判断目标视觉阵列的平均形状或颜色，而目标视觉阵列之前是一个不相关的初始阵列。通过对目标阵列和目标阵列中与任务相关和与任务无关的特征信息进行正交处理，发现当目标阵列和目标阵列中特征信息的可变性相匹配时，观察者的反应速度更快。至关重要的是，无论初始和目标数组中的元素特征是否重叠，这种效应都会发生，甚至当从相反的类别中提取初始和目标特征时也会出现这种效应。这种“方差启动”现象发生在启动-目标间隔短至100毫秒的情况下。进一步的实验表明，这种效应不依赖于资源分配，即使在初始和目标不共享相同的空间位置时也会发生。这些结果表明，人类观察者适应了视觉信息的可变性，并为存在一种低级机制提供了证据，通过这种机制可以快速提取视觉信息的范围或分散。这些信息可能反过来有助于设置感知选择过程中神经元处理的增益。
According to recent theories, perception relies on summary representations that encode statistical information about the sensory environment. Here, we used perceptual priming to characterize the representations that mediate categorization of a complex visual array. Observers judged the average shape or color of a target visual array that was preceded by an irrelevant prime array. Manipulating the variability of task-relevant and task-irrelevant feature information in the prime and target orthogonally, we found that observers were faster to respond when the variability of feature information in the prime and target arrays matched. Critically, this effect occurred irrespective of whether the element-by-element features in the prime and target array overlapped or not, and was even present when prime and target features were drawn from opposing categories. This "priming by variance" phenomenon occurred with prime-target intervals as short as 100 ms. Further experiments showed that this effect did not depend on resource allocation, and occurred even when prime and target did not share the same spatial location. These results suggest that human observers adapt to the variability of visual information, and provide evidence for the existence of a low-level mechanism by which the range or dispersion of visual information is rapidly extracted. This information may in turn help to set the gain of neuronal processing during perceptual choice.