Anatomical constraints on cognition and how they develop

描述（由申请人提供）：众所周知，人类视觉认知具有严格的能力限制：我们一次只能感知和记住几个项目。这些限制的性质是什么？多年来，研究人员试图用各种著名的行为范式（变化盲视、无意盲视等）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， 已经进行了将感知和记忆的能力限制与涉及表示视觉对象的视觉区域（例如腹侧视觉皮层）的潜在神经结构相关联的工作。几十年的神经科学研究表明，高级对象（如面部、身体、场景和物体）在腹侧视觉皮层中由不同的神经网络表示，这些神经网络通常不重叠。因此，我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库。最近，作为我博士论文的一部分，我发现了支持这一观点的证据，证明如果信息来自不同的类别（例如面孔和场景），而不是同一类别（例如只有面孔），人们可以在视觉工作记忆中存储更多的信息。此外，呈现不同类别的好处的大小与参与代表这些类别的神经区域在腹侧视觉皮层中重叠的程度相关。拟议研究的目标是：1）更彻底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关系是如何发展的。在目标1中，我们将首先测量视觉系统内不同区域的表征结构（例如，枕颞皮层，早期视觉皮层等）。响应于广泛的刺激类别（面部、身体、电话、锤子、猫等）。然后，我们将看到是否可以通过这种结构的组织来预测多个感知任务（例如对象分类和视觉搜索）的性能。在目标2中，我们将重复 与目标1相同的程序，但将对成人和5-7岁的儿童进行。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感知施加了相同的约束。这项工作将深入了解人类认知的局限性，并阐明这些局限性是如何发展的。此外，理解视觉系统的发育时间过程及其与儿童行为的关系可以作为有用的基准，可以在临床环境中用于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.).