Neural Mechanisms of Preferential-looking

描述（由申请人提供）：偏好范式依赖于婴儿对观看新颖刺激的固有“偏好”（即新颖性偏好）来提供记忆或歧视的证据。我们的长期目标是阐明在优先注视任务中表现的神经机制，以推进我们对视觉注意和记忆的功能神经生物学和发展的认识。这些知识对于理解认知发展具有重要意义，并将最终帮助我们了解这些系统的发育中断如何导致发育障碍。这项研究背后的具体假设是，偏好观看主要反映了视觉场景在知觉存储中的附带编码，而不是信息的回忆或识别。本建议的具体目的是：1。调查新颖性和熟悉性偏好是否与相同或不同的认知过程有关。通过研究视觉配对比较（VPC）中的偏好观察与通过erp对熟悉刺激的后续处理之间的关系，研究新颖性偏好和熟悉偏好的潜在过程。ERP组成部分的地形差异可以推断为反映潜在神经回路的差异，从而反映认知过程。

Description (provided by applicant): Preferential-looking paradigms rely on an infant's inherent "preference" for viewing novel stimuli (i.e., novelty preferences) to provide evidence for memory or discrimination. Our long-term goal is to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying performance on preferential-looking tasks in order to advance our knowledge about the functional neurobiology and development of visual attention and memory. Such knowledge has important implications for understanding cognitive development in general, and will ultimately help to inform our understanding of how disruptions in the development of these systems may give rise to developmental disorders. The specific hypothesis behind the proposed research is that preferential-looking primarily reflects the incidental encoding of the visual scene into a perceptual store vs. the recollection or recognition of information. The specific aims of this proposal are to: 1. Investigate whether novelty and familiarity preferences are associated with the same or different cognitive processes. The processes underlying novelty and familiarity preferences will be investigated by examining he relation between preferential-looking in the visual-paired comparison (VPC) and subsequent processing of the familiar stimulus via ERPs. Differences in the topography of ERP components can be inferred to reflect differences in the underlying neural circuits, and hence cognitive processes. 2. Dissociate processes related to recognition vs. priming. This will be accomplished by examining the relation between novelty preferences in the VPC and subsequent ERP differences during the processing of familiar and novel stimuli. 3. Dissociate processes related to familiarity vs. recency. This will be accomplished by investigating the effects of repetition of novel and familiar stimuli on ERPs in 6-month olds, focusing in particular on components that have been related to performance on preferential-looking tasks in previous work.