认知神经科学关于表象的研究

Cognitive Neuroscience Research on Visual Mental Imagery

表象是不是除命题表征之外的一种独立的表征问题一直是心理学上争论不休的话题。争论的焦点主要在视觉表象与视知觉的关系上,有些研究发现视觉表象能够激活视觉系统,甚至能够激活较早的视觉皮质(如V1区),而且视知觉的选择性障碍也会导致相应的视觉表象障碍,但另外的研究却没有发现视觉表象能够激活较早的视觉皮质,而且发现视觉表象与视知觉存在双重分离。文章最后讨论了视觉表象研究中存在的一些问题。

Mental imagery has fallen within the purview of philosophy and cognitive psychology. Both enterprises have raised important questions about imagery, but have not made substantial progress in answering them. With the advent of cognitive neuroseienee, these questions have become empirically tractable. This article reviews evidence from measurements of regional brain activity in normal subjects and evidence from patients with brain damage. Visual perception and visual mental imagery, have often been regarded as cognitive functions subserved by common mechanisms. Although many neuroimaging studies of visual mental imagery have revealed activation in early visual cortex, many others have not. Some reports of brain - damaged patients showed that an imagery deficit often parallels a pereeptual impairment in the same cognitive domain while other reports of patients showing double dissociations between perception and imagery abilities challenging the perception - imagery equivalence hypothesis. The problems in visual imagery researches are discussed in the end.