Visual Knowledge of Objects

描述(由申请人提供)：在过去的几十年里，对概念的形成、表征和组织的研究一直是认知心理学领域的核心。语义记忆的一个主要理论(Allport，1985)将对象概念描述为在功能和物理上不同的属性域中实现的分布式心理表征，这些属性域对应于不同的感觉或运动域，它们也是不同的感觉或运动域的一部分。事实上，根据Allport的说法，这些模块正是大脑中专门处理感觉运动信息的区域。在认知和认知神经科学文献中被广泛讨论的一个这样的属性域是视觉知识域。这一属性域是当前提案中调查的主题。具体地说，我们的目标是(1)表征视觉知识属性域，特别是考察关于物体外观的概念表征中平行于视觉知觉的细分；(2)探索不同概念和类别的视觉知识提取的差异；(3)调查视觉知识和视觉知觉之间的联系；以及(4)将视觉知识属性域中的个体差异与行为和经验的差异联系起来。拟议的实验使用了各种方法，包括正常受试者、先天性失明成年人和脑损伤患者的行为实验，以及正常受试者和先天性失明受试者的神经成像实验。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Investigations of the formation, representation, and organization of concepts have been central to the field of cognitive psychology over the past several decades. One dominant theory of semantic memory (Allport, 1985) describes object concepts as distributed mental representations implemented in functionally and physically distinct attribute-domains that correspond to different sensory or motor domains of which they are also a part. In fact, according to Allport, these modules are the very same areas of the brain that are dedicated to processing sensorimotor information. One such attribute-domain that has been discussed extensively in the cognitive and cognitive neuroscience literatures is the domain of visual knowledge. This attribute-domain is the topic of investigation in the current proposal. Specifically, we aim (1) to characterize visual knowledge attribute-domains and, in particular, to examine subdivisions in conceptual representations about object appearance that parallel subdivisions in visual perception; (2) to explore variation in visual knowledge retrieval across different concepts and categories; (3) to investigate the link between visual knowledge and visual perception; and, (4) to relate individual differences in visual knowledge attribute-domains to variation in behavior and experience. The proposed experiments make use of a variety of methodologies, including behavioral experiments in normal subjects, congenitally blind adults, and brain-damaged patients, and neuroimaging experiments in both normal and congenitally blind subjects.