Anatomical constraints on cognition and how they develop

描述(申请人提供)：众所周知，人类视觉认知有严格的容量限制：我们一次只能感知和记忆几个项目。这些限制的性质是什么？几年来，研究人员一直试图使用各种众所周知的行为范式(改变盲、疏忽盲等)来回答这个问题。虽然这项工作产生了各种重要的发现，但令人惊讶的是， 已有研究将知觉和记忆的容量极限与代表视觉对象的视觉区域(例如腹侧视觉皮质)的潜在神经结构联系起来。几十年的神经科学研究表明，高级物体(如人脸、身体、场景和物体)在腹侧视觉皮质由不同的神经网络表示，这些神经网络通常是不重叠的。因此，人们很自然地想知道这些可分离的神经结构是否对应于不同的认知资源池。最近，作为我博士论文的一部分，我找到了支持这一观点的证据，证明如果信息来自不同的类别(例如，人脸和场景)而不是相同的类别(例如，只有人脸)，人们可以在视觉工作记忆中存储更多的信息。此外，呈现不同类别的益处的大小与代表这些类别的神经区在腹侧视觉皮质中重叠的程度相关。这项研究的目标是1)更深入地研究神经组织和感知能力之间的关系，2)研究解剖学和行为之间的这种关系是如何发展的。在目标1中，我们将首先测量视觉系统中不同区域(例如枕颞叶皮质、早期视觉皮质等)的表征结构。对各种刺激类别(脸部、身体、手机、锤子、猫等)做出反应。然后，我们将看到多个知觉任务(例如，对象分类和视觉搜索)的性能是否可以通过这种结构的组织来预测。在目标2中，我们将重复 程序与目标1相同，但将适用于5-7岁的成年人和儿童。由此，我们会问，儿童和成人的视觉系统的表征结构是否相同，以及这种结构是否对两组人的知觉施加了相同的限制。这项工作将提供对人类认知的局限性的洞察，并阐明这些局限性是如何发展的。此外，了解视觉系统的发育时间进程及其与儿童行为的关系可以作为有用的基准，可用于临床环境中理解和诊断患有已知影响视觉系统的发育障碍的儿童(例如自闭症、阅读障碍等)。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Human visual cognition is known to have strict capacity limitations: we can only perceive and remember a few items at a time. What is the nature of these limitations? For several years, researchers have attempted to answer this question using a variety of well-known behavioral paradigms (change blindness, inattentional blindness, etc.). While this work has produced a variety of important findings, surprisingly little work has been done to relate the capacity limits of perception and memory to the underlying neural architecture of the visual regions involved in representing visual objects (e.g ventral visual cortex). Several decades of neuroscience research have shown that high-level objects (e.g. faces, bodies, scenes, and objects) are represented in the ventral visual cortex by distinct neural networks that are often non-overlapping. Thus, it is natural to wonder if these dissociable neural structures correspond to distinct pools of cognitive resources. Recently, as part of my doctoral thesis, I found evidence in support of this idea by showing that people can store more information in visual working memory if that information comes from different categories (e.g. faces and scenes) rather than the same category (e.g. only faces). Moreover, the size of the benefit from presenting different categories was correlated with the extent to which the neural regions involved in representing those categories overlapped in ventral visual cortex. The goals of the proposed research are 1) to more thoroughly investigate the relationship between neural organization and perceptual abilities and 2) to examine how this relationship between anatomy and behavior develops. In Aim 1, we will first measure the representational structure of different regions within the visual system (e.g. occipitotemporal cortex, early visual cortex, etc.) in response to a wide range of stimulus categories (faces, bodies, phones, hammers, cats, etc.). Then we will see if performance with multiple perceptual tasks (e.g. object categorization and visual search) can be predicted by the organization of this structure. In Aim 2, we will repeat the same procedures as those in Aim 1, but will do so with adults and children ages 5-7. From this, we will ask if the representational structure of the visual system is the same in children and adults, and if that structure imposes the same constrain on perception across the two groups. This work will provide insight into the limitations of human cognition and shed light on how those limitations develop. Furthermore, understanding of the developmental time course of the visual system and its relation to behavior in children could serve as useful benchmarks that could be used in clinical settings to understand and diagnose children with developmental disorders that are known to affect the visual system (e.g. autism, dyslexia, etc.).