Neural Mechanisms of Preferential-looking

描述（由申请人提供）：偏好性外观范例依赖于婴儿对观看新刺激的固有“偏好”（即，新奇的偏好），以提供证据的记忆或歧视。我们的长期目标是阐明优先寻找任务的神经机制，以促进我们对功能神经生物学和视觉注意力和记忆发展的认识。这些知识对于理解一般的认知发展具有重要意义，并最终有助于我们了解这些系统的发展中断如何导致发育障碍。这项研究背后的具体假设是，偏好性外观主要反映了视觉场景到感知存储的附带编码，而不是信息的回忆或识别。这项建议的具体目标是：1. 调查是否新奇和熟悉的偏好与相同或不同的认知过程。本研究通过研究视觉配对比较（VPC）中的偏好性注视和随后的熟悉刺激加工之间的关系，探讨了新奇和熟悉性偏好的加工过程。ERP组件的拓扑结构的差异可以被推断为反映了底层神经回路的差异，从而反映了认知过程。 2.与识别和启动相关的分离过程。这将是通过检查VPC和随后的ERP差异在熟悉和新颖的刺激处理过程中的新奇偏好之间的关系。 3.与熟悉性和近因性相关的分离过程。这将是通过调查重复的新的和熟悉的刺激对ERPs在6个月奥尔兹的影响，特别是专注于组件已在以前的工作中与性能的偏好寻找任务。

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.