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。一个占主导地位的语义记忆理论（Allport, 1985）将对象概念描述为分布式的心理表征，在功能和物理上不同的属性域中实现，这些属性域对应于不同的感觉或运动域，它们也是其中的一部分。事实上，根据奥尔波特的说法，这些模块是大脑中专门处理感觉运动信息的区域。其中一个在认知和认知神经科学文献中被广泛讨论的属性领域是视觉知识领域。该属性域是本文研究的主题。具体而言，我们的目标是(1)表征视觉知识属性域，特别是检查与视觉感知中的细分平行的关于物体外观的概念表征中的细分；(2)探讨视觉知识检索在不同概念和类别间的差异；(3)研究视觉知识与视觉感知的关系；(4)将视觉知识属性域的个体差异与行为和经验的差异联系起来。实验采用多种方法，包括正常受试者、先天性失明成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影像学实验。

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.