自然物体分类的ERP研究

对事物进行分类的能力是人类的一种基本认知功能。该文主要就近年来自然物体分类的事件相关电位（ERP）研究情况进行综述。首先介绍与自然物体分类有关的ERP早晚期成分；接着讨论了快速视觉分类的加工机制，认为前馈机制在这种复杂分类任务的视觉加工过程中起重要作用；最后详细介绍了两个分离的视觉加工机制，认为自然物体的视觉分类在不同时程涉及不同机制：即首先是任务无关的早期知觉加工过程，其次是任务相关的、类别无关的加工机制，与被试的决策有关。也讨论了这两个分离的加工过程涉及的神经基础。

ERP Study on Human Visual Categorization of Natural Objects

The ability to classify stimuli into meaningful categories is a fundamental cognitive function of the human being. The present review focused on the event-related brain potentials (ERP) studies on human visual categorization of natural objects. Early and late components of the ERP accompanying the visual categorization of natural objects were discussed on the basis of an extensive review of the relevant literature. Then, the paper described the mechanisms of the Rapid Visual Categorization of natural objects, and supports the view that feed-forward mechanism plays critical role in the visual processing of such complex categorization task. Finally, two separate mechanisms of visual processing were discussed in details, and it was concluded that visual categorization of a natural object involves different mechanisms with different time courses: a perceptual, task-independent mechanism, followed by a task-related, category-independent process which is correlated with the subjects decision. Specific neural structures of these two separate processes were also discussed in this section.