HEИндивидуална стипендия2023–2025

ViSyRelPer · Perceptual foundations of relational thinking

„Хоризонт Европа“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2023-05-01 → 2025-04-30
Финансиране от ЕС: 211 755 €
Участници: 2
Схема: HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Визуалната система и начинът, по който разпознаваме връзки между обекти, например че и тигър в вана, и цвете във ваза, са в състояние на „съдържание“. Това помага да се разбере как човешкият мозък кодира сложни отношения независимо от самите предмети.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Perceptual foundations of relational thinking

The ability to represent relations, the properties holding between things, is regarded as a distinctive feature that can account for the complexity and uniqueness of the human mind. Yet, we do not know how relational representations come about in the human mind/brain. Are relations represented discretely and explicitly, separately from the objects participating in them? Or are they represented as basic properties of the objects in the scope of the relation? Relational representations have primarily been studied in the context of higher-level cognitive functions such as language and reasoning. Only recently, scholars have begun to investigate their perceptual underpinnings, yielding a new research field, which exploits the constructs and methods of vision science to investigate whether and how we see (i.e., encode) relations holding between objects, just like we see features such as colour, motion, shape and so on. This initial work on relation perception has shown that the early stages of the representation of relations between objects in visual scenes are encoded in visual areas. Visual areas would host specialized structures for representing objects as well as their relations, such as support (A is on B), containment (A is in B), and other relational aspect of the world such as causality (A hits B that starts moving) and social interaction (A does something to/with B). The working hypothesis of ViSyRelPer is that the visual system computes high-level relations, categorizing configurations of multiple objects into distinct relational types, independently from the objects that constitute the relation. On this hypothesis, in vision, depictions of a "tiger in a bath" and "a flower in a vase" will be recognized as instances of the same relation “in” (containment), despite their perceptual dissimilarities. In addressing this hypothesis, ViSyRelPer asks how far vision can go in representing the visual world, particularly whether it can afford high-level representations of relations that generalize across different situations that do not share the same visual featues. The overarching goal of ViSyRelPer is to study the role of visual perception in the representation of relations. This research will contribute to determine the computational goals of human vision, and to develop a model that accounts for how relational contents come about in the human mind/brain.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

Classic models of visual perception pose that the ultimate goal of vision is object recognition. Recentresearch suggests that visual perception is more sophisticated, representing the objects as well as therelations holding between them. Relational representations are a major research focus in cognitivescience, as they play a central role in human reasoning, language and social life. Yet, how they comeabout in the human mind/brain remains largely unknown. In ViSyRelPer, I study the role of the visualsystem in encoding relations, under the hypothesis that perception realizes the early stages of relationalrepresentation. I focus on two categories of relations: causal and social-interact. First, I use frequency-tagging electroencephalography (FTEEG) to measure the automatic neural response of the visual systemto visual stimulation, and study whether: a) such response is evoked during observation of relationalevents (e.g. for causal relation: collision events) and b) generalizes to different instantiations of the samerelation (e.g. for causal relation: launching and pulling events). Generalization would imply that the visualresponse reflects the representation of a relation, above and beyond the specific objects involved.Second, I use transcranial magnetic stimulation to interfere with activity in visuoperceptual brain areaswhile participants perform judgments on relational events. This study proves a causal role of visual areasin relation processing, thus substantiating the hypothesis of relation perception. Third, I use the aboveFTEEG approach to study perception of social and causal relations in individuals with autism spectrumdisorder. I will investigate whether alterations in the visuoperceptual stages of relation representationcould be a marker of difficulties in the disorder, as raised in latest research. This program will offer newavenues to discover the perceptual groundings of relational thinking underlying the complexity of human cognition.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS · ParisКоординаторФранция
Institut des Sciences Cognitives- Marc Jeannerod (UMR5229), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique · BronФранция