TOPOGRAPHICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MENTAL IMAGES IN PRIMARY VISUAL-CORTEX
TOPOGRAPHICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MENTAL IMAGES IN PRIMARY VISUAL-CORTEX
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DOI：
10.1038/378496a0
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发表时间：
1995-11-30
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
ALPERT, NM
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
KOSSLYN, SM;THOMPSON, WL;ALPERT, NM
我们在此报告使用正电子发射断层扫描（PET）来揭示当受试者闭上眼睛并想象物体时，初级视觉皮层被激活。图像的大小系统地与最大活动的位置相关，这是意料之中的，因为最早的视觉区域是空间组织的（1-5）。然而，这些结果只有在将图像条件与非图像基线进行比较时才明显，在非图像基线中，呈现相同的听觉线索（因此刺激是受控的）；当使用静息基线时（因此大脑激活不受控制），由于在基线条件下视觉皮层的激活，图像激活被掩盖了。这些发现解决了文献中关于意象是否激活早期视觉皮层（6-11岁）的争论，并表明视觉心理意象涉及“描述性”表征，而不仅仅是语言类描述（12-14岁）。此外，存储的视觉信息甚至会影响最早的视觉区域的处理过程，这一事实表明，知识从根本上会影响人们所看到的东西。
WE report here the use of positron emission tomography (PET) to reveal that the primary visual cortex is activated when subjects close their eyes and visualize objects. The size of the image is systematically related to the location of maximal activity, which is as expected because the earliest visual areas are spatially organized(1-5). These results were only evident, however, when imagery conditions were compared to a non-imagery baseline in which the same auditory cues were presented (and hence the stimuli were controlled); when a resting baseline was used (and hence brain activation was uncontrolled), imagery activation was obscured because of activation in visual cortex during the baseline condition. These findings resolve a debate in the literature about whether imagery activates early visual cortex(6-11) and indicate that visual mental imagery involves 'depictive' representations, not solely language-like descriptions(12-14). Moreover, the fact that stored visual information can affect processing in even the earliest visual areas suggests that knowledge can fundamentally bias what one sees.