A multi-methodological, integrative investigation of how visual representations underlie behaviour.

我们如何与周围的世界互动取决于我们大脑处理传入感官信息的能力。例如，我们在周围环境中面对无数的视觉信息，我们是否/如何对这些信息采取行动取决于许多认知过程和因素，包括我们选择关注什么（选择性注意），我们如何感知传入的视觉信息（视觉感知），我们以前的个人经验（情景记忆）和我们现有的世界知识（语义记忆）。到目前为止，大量的研究已经调查了大脑如何支持这些认知过程，以及各个过程如何与视觉信息相互作用。然而，关于这些不同的认知过程如何相互作用并共同作用于视觉信息的研究相对较少。这一点至关重要，因为即使是一个简单的行为，如伸手去拿食物，也不是单一认知过程的结果，而是许多过程之间相互作用的结果。因此，目前的研究计划旨在使用一些不同的实验技术来了解多种认知过程如何与人脑中的视觉信息相互作用，从而产生行为，特别关注空间场景和物体，这是我们每天遇到的两种最常见的视觉类别。功能性神经成像将用于探索大脑活动的位置和时间，磁刺激将用于研究不同大脑区域对特定过程的重要性，计算建模将允许在理论框架内解释实验数据。这项研究将为人类对视觉信息的反应以及实现这种行为的大脑机制提供新的见解。

How we interact with the world around us is reliant on our brain's ability to process incoming sensory information. For example, we are faced with a myriad of visual information in our immediate environment and whether/how we act on this information depends on a number of cognitive processes and factors including what we choose to pay attention to (selective attention), how we perceive the incoming visual information (visual perception), our previous personal experiences (episodic memory) and our existing knowledge of the world (semantic memory). To date, a large amount of research has investigated how the brain subserves these cognitive processes and how individual processes interact with visual information. There has, however, been relatively little work on how these various cognitive processes interact with each other and act, in concert, on visual information. This is crucial since even a simple behavioural act such as reaching for food is not the result of a single cognitive process but rather interactions between numerous processes. The current research proposal, therefore, aims to use a number of different experimental techniques to understand how multiple cognitive processes interact with visual information in the human brain to give rise to behaviour, with a particular focus on spatial scenes and objects, two of the most common types of visual categories that we encounter on a daily basis. Functional neuroimaging will be used to explore the location and timing of brain activity, magnetic stimulation will be used to investigate the importance of different brain regions to specific processes, and computational modelling will allow experimental data to be interpreted within a theoretical framework. This research will provide novel insights into human behaviour in response to visual information and the brain mechanisms that enable this behaviour.