Mechanisms of surface-based selection

我们依靠远见来指导我们的行动。由于眼睛可以获得的信息比大脑同时处理的信息多，我们的视觉系统被认为能力有限。为了克服这一瓶颈，大脑有优先处理视觉信息子集的机制。一个这样的过程是基于曲面的选择，它已被证明选择两个重叠的透明曲面中的一个。例如，开车时，司机会注意车前的道路，而不是上面有虫子或泥土的挡风玻璃，尽管肮脏的挡风玻璃具有相同的视野。这项提议的目的是阐明基于表面的选择的机制。第一组实验研究不同的刺激特征如何调制基于表面的选择。这些实验将通过确定哪些特征可以调制表面选择来约束基于表面的选择的机制(S)。了解这些边界条件将有助于确定选择的轨迹和发生这种选择的最早阶段(S)。第二组实验确定了调制基于表面的选择的特征是并行工作的，还是同一机制的一部分。这将测试组合特性对选择是否具有加性、乘性或无额外影响。不同的特征彼此之间可能有不同的关系。这些结果将有助于建模不同特征对曲面表示和基于曲面的选择的相对贡献。因此，这些实验将限制产生选择的可能的生理机制。*更好地理解基于表面的选择和表面表示将导致我们对基本特征如何绑定到一个对象中的知识的增加。这一结果还将对与注意力和物体处理有关的各种神经障碍产生影响，例如自闭症和精神分裂症。

We rely on vision to guide our actions. As there is more information available to the eyes than the brain can process simultaneously, our visual system is said to have limited capacity. To overcome this bottleneck, the brain has mechanisms to preferentially process a subset of the visual information. One such process is surface-based selection, which has been shown to select one of two overlapping transparent surfaces. For example, when driving a car, the driver attends to the road in front of car instead of the windshield with bugs or dirt on it, even though the dirty windshield shares the same field of view.   The aim of this proposal is to elucidate the mechanisms of surface-based selection. The first set of experiments investigates how different stimulus characteristics modulate surface-based selection.  These experiments will constrain the mechanism(s) of surface-based selection by determining which characteristics can modulate it. Knowing these boundary conditions will help determine the locus of selection and the earliest stage(s) at which this selection is occurring.   The second set of experiments determines whether the characteristics that modulate surface-based selection work in parallel or are part of the same mechanism. This would test whether combining characteristics has an additive, multiplicative or no additional influence on selection. Different characteristics may have different relationships with each other. The results will facilitate modeling the relative contributions of different characteristics on surface representations and surface-based selection. Thus, the experiments will constrain the possible physiological mechanisms giving rise to selection.   A better understanding of surface-based selection and surface representation will lead to an increase in our knowledge of how basic features are bound together into an object. The results will also have implications for a variety of neurological disorders linked to attention and object-processing, such as autism and schizophrenia.