Representing object ensembles in the human brain: Where, when and what

代表人脑中的对象集合：地点、时间和内容

• 批准号: 8399399
• 负责人: YAODA XU
• 金额: $ 42.25万
• 依托单位: HARVARD UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-08-01 至 2015-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8399399
• 关键词: Algorithms; Anterior; Attention; Behavioral; Brain; Brain Injuries; Brain region; Cognitive; Complement; Computers; Crowding; Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Human; Learning; Medial; Nature; Neurosciences Research; Occipital lobe; Parahippocampal Gyrus; Parietal Lobe; Perception; Pilot Projects; Process; Publishing; Research; Research Personnel; Role; Shapes; Surface; Techniques; Texture; Thinking; Vision; Visual; Visual Cortex; Visual attention; Visual system structure; brain behavior; cognitive neuroscience; collateral sulcus; extrastriate visual cortex; interest; neuromechanism; object perception; object recognition; relating to nervous system; retinotopic; statistics; theories; visual cognition; visual object processing

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our visual world is filled with clusters (or ensembles) of objects. For many visual tasks, such as attending and selecting specific objects for thoughts or actions, we need to individuate and encode distinctive features from single objects. Such object-specific processing has been the core of cognitive and neuroscientific research for the past few decades. In contrast, there are also ample occasions when our visual system extracts summary statistics from an object ensemble without representing each object in the ensemble in great detail. Such object-ensemble representation can help us rapidly segment an otherwise crowded visual scene and allow us to zoom in on specific objects of interest. Object-ensemble representation thus complements and guides object- specific processing and allows our visual system to overcome the capacity limitation of object-specific processing. Yet despite the common occurrence of object ensembles in our visual world, the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying object-ensemble processing remains poorly understood. Using fMRI, this proposal will first identify where in the human brain object ensembles are represented, under what attentional condition this representation can be formed, and then examine the nature of the neural object ensemble representation by studying how mean and variance of ensemble features are represented. The proposed studies will be one of the first to systematically investigate how real world object ensembles are processed in the human brain. Besides furthering our understanding of the connection between brain and behavior, results of these studies will have significant impact on current cognitive and neural theories on visual object perception. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The proposed research will help us understand the various constrains and limitations in normal visual cognition. It also has significant implications for understanding the impact of brain damage on visual object perception and recognition.

描述（由申请人提供）：我们的视觉世界充满了物体的簇（或整体）。对于许多视觉任务，例如关注和选择特定对象进行思考或行动，我们需要对单个对象的独特特征进行区分和编码。这种特定于对象的处理一直是过去几十年认知和神经科学研究的核心。相比之下，在很多情况下，我们的视觉系统从对象集合中提取摘要统计数据，而没有详细地表示集合中的每个对象。这种对象集合表示可以帮助我们快速分割原本拥挤的视觉场景，并允许我们放大感兴趣的特定对象。因此，对象整体表示补充并指导了特定于对象的处理，并使我们的视觉系统能够克服特定于对象的处理的能力限制。然而，尽管对象集合在我们的视觉世界中很常见，但对象集合处理背后的认知和神经机制仍然知之甚少。使用功能磁共振成像，该提案将首先确定人脑中对象集合的表示形式，在什么注意条件下可以形成这种表示，然后通过研究集合特征的均值和方差的表示方式来检查神经对象集合表示的性质。拟议的研究将是第一个系统地研究现实世界对象集合在人脑中如何处理的研究之一。除了进一步加深我们对大脑与行为之间联系的理解之外，这些研究结果还将对当前视觉对象感知的认知和神经理论产生重大影响。 公共健康相关性：拟议的研究将帮助我们了解正常视觉认知的各种限制和限制。它还对于理解脑损伤对视觉对象感知和识别的影响具有重要意义。