人脑中概念的表征机制——来自先天色盲人群与先天视觉表象缺失人群的研究

概念知识是人类生活的重要基础。人类从感知觉经验和语言交流中获得各种概念知识。大脑中是否既存在基于感知觉经验的概念表征又存在基于语言的概念表征，一直是认知神经科学领域悬而未决的焦点问题之一。申请人前期关于先天盲人概念表征的研究为概念基于语言与基于感知觉经验的双重表征机制提供了初步证据。本项目拟基于前期工作，利用颜色知识仅能通过视觉与语言获得的特点，借助先天色盲人群通过视觉与通过语言所获得的颜色知识不一致的特点（研究一），以及先天视觉表象缺失人群视觉与语言经验正常但无法提取来自视觉经验的信息的特点（研究二），探索视觉经验及语言在客体颜色知识表征中的作用，揭示人脑中基于视觉经验与基于语言的概念表征脑机制。本项目旨在揭示人脑概念表征方式以及感知觉、语言经验在其中的作用，成果有望为人工智能研究提供启示。

Concept knowledge is fundamental and very important to human life. We acquire various conceptual knowledge from perceptual experience and language communication. Whether the knowledge representation in the brain is based on perceptual experiences or on perceptual-independent, language-based amodal symbols has long been one of the core issues in cognitive neuroscience. The applicant's previous works on the neural representation of conceptual knowledge in the congenital blind population provided preliminary evidence for the two forms of knowledge representation in the human brain. Based on previous works, the current project plans to explore the role of visual experience and language in the representation of object color knowledge, and to reveal and dissociate the language-based and the visual-experience-based knowledge representations in the human brain by studying the object color knowledge which can only be obtained through vision and language in two special population – the congenital color-blind individuals who have inconsistent vision-derived and language-derived color knowledge due to color vision deficiency (Study 1), and the congenital aphantasia individuals who cannot voluntarily retrieve visual-experience-based mental images (Study 2). This project aims to reveal the form of conceptual representation in the human brain and the role of language and perceptual experience in knowledge representation. The results are expected to provide inspirations for researches on artificial intelligence.