Impaired auditory sensorimotor gating： An animal model of schizophrenia

Establishment of animal models of schizophrenia is critical for both understanding the mechanisms underlying this severe mental disease and developing new antipsychotics. This paper starts from the theoretical root of sensory gating, the 損rotection-of-processing? theory, then thoroughly describes the representative studies over the past decade on the mechanism underlying prepulse inhibition and on those underlying modulation of prepulse inhibition, which is the normal startle suppression caused by the weak stimulus preceding the intense startling stimulus. The main methods for inducing prepulse inhibition deficits in experimental animals include: ⅰ) modulations of neuro- transmission that are closely associated with schizophrenia; ⅱ) focal lesions or pharmacological manipulations of brain structures in the cortico-striato-pallido-pontine circuit; and ⅲ) maternal deprivation or social isolation. Six essential topics for studies in modeling schizophrenia are suggested at the last part of this review.     

《庄子》虚幻思维研究

《庄子》＂谬悠之说,荒唐之言,无端崖之辞,时恣纵而不傥,不以见之也＂的独特风格的形成原因,是一种以＂虚构＂和＂幻想＂组成的＂虚幻＂思维。通过深入探析这一思维的结构内核,我们可以发现其对当下的本土奇幻小说的影响。     

幻象·幻想·诗意言说——海子抒情短诗解读

海子及其诗歌是中国当代诗歌史上特殊的文化存在。本文尝试着从存在的表象/幻象、丰盈的想象/幻想、诗意言说方式、神性体验和神性光辉四个方面对海子的抒情短诗进行解读,并探讨和说明海子及其诗歌在诗学理念和美学实践上与梵高、海德格尔、荷尔德林等人的精神渊源关系。有所发明的是把海子诗歌的幻象体系与海德格尔的天地人神四重世界整体相联系,以及在分析归纳后提出了海子诗歌独特的“诗意言说方式”。     

《神木》:人物符号修辞化与修辞幻象

小说<神木>中的人物符号之间存在着两种修辞化的关系:杀人者与杀人者之间是隐蔽的集团化关系,被杀者与杀人者之间是显性的血缘化的关系.同时这两种关系导致了人物走向不同的修辞幻象:杀人者在自我身份的认识上完全丧失了"真我"而走向杀人,被杀者在虚假的血缘化中不断走向真情.因此,运用人物符号修辞化与修辞幻象的理论才能真正解读小说<神木>.     

公路视错觉减速标线参数优化

为提高道路危险路段运营安全水平,促使驾驶人主动降低车辆运行速度至安全范围,对比并优化了减速标线的形式及设计参数。依据人在动态环境下视错觉减速标线作用机理,对鱼刺形视错觉减速标线各设计参数进行分析和初选,并提出变间距减速标线相隔距离的计算方法。将不同设计参数进行组合,依据正交试验方案,利用仿真试验平台和实际道路试验,对比各种形式标线的实际减速效果。研究表明:不同设计参数的鱼刺形减速标线,其实际减速效果有很大差异,合理的参数设计方能产生良好的减速效果;与等间距标线相比,变间距减速标线的减速效果更优。     

《神木》：人物符号修辞化与修辞幻象

小说<神木>中的人物符号之间存在着两种修辞化的关系:杀人者与杀人者之间是隐蔽的集团化关系,被杀者与杀人者之间是显性的血缘化的关系.同时这两种关系导致了人物走向不同的修辞幻象:杀人者在自我身份的认识上完全丧失了"真我"而走向杀人,被杀者在虚假的血缘化中不断走向真情.因此,运用人物符号修辞化与修辞幻象的理论才能真正解读小说<神木>.     

Imaging cortical correlates of illusion in early visual cortex

Exploring visual illusions reveals fundamental principles of cortical processing. Illusory motion perception of non-moving stimuli was described almost a century ago by Gestalt psychologists. However, the underlying neuronal mechanisms remain unknown. To explore cortical mechanisms underlying the 'line-motion' illusion, we used real-time optical imaging, which is highly sensitive to subthreshold activity. We examined, in the visual cortex of the anaesthetized cat, responses to five stimuli: a stationary small square and a long bar; a moving square; a drawn-out bar; and the well-known line-motion illusion, a stationary square briefly preceding a long stationary bar presentation. Whereas flashing the bar alone evoked the expected localized, short latency and high amplitude activity patterns, presenting a square 60-100 ms before a bar induced the dynamic activity patterns resembling that of fast movement. The preceding square, even though physically non-moving, created gradually propagating subthreshold cortical activity that must contribute to illusory motion, because it was indistinguishable from cortical representations of real motion in this area. These findings demonstrate the effect of spatio-temporal patterns of subthreshold synaptic potentials on cortical processing and the shaping of perception.     

A new perceptual illusion reveals mechanisms of sensory decoding

Perceptual illusions are usually thought to arise from the way sensory signals are encoded by the brain, and indeed are often used to infer the mechanisms of sensory encoding. But perceptual illusions might also result from the way the brain decodes sensory information, reflecting the strategies that optimize performance in particular tasks. In a fine discrimination task, the most accurate information comes from neurons tuned away from the discrimination boundary, and observers seem to use signals from these 'displaced' neurons to optimize their performance. We wondered whether using signals from these neurons might also bias perception. In a fine direction discrimination task using moving random-dot stimuli, we found that observers' perception of the direction of motion is indeed biased away from the boundary. This misperception can be accurately described by a decoding model that preferentially weights signals from neurons whose responses best discriminate those directions. In a coarse discrimination task, to which a different decoding rule applies, the same stimulus is not misperceived, suggesting that the illusion is a direct consequence of the decoding strategy that observers use to make fine perceptual judgments. The subjective experience of motion is therefore not mediated directly by the responses of sensory neurons, but is only developed after the responses of these neurons are decoded.     

Efficient auditory coding

The auditory neural code must serve a wide range of auditory tasks that require great sensitivity in time and frequency and be effective over the diverse array of sounds present in natural acoustic environments. It has been suggested that sensory systems might have evolved highly efficient coding strategies to maximize the information conveyed to the brain while minimizing the required energy and neural resources. Here we show that, for natural sounds, the complete acoustic waveform can be represented efficiently with a nonlinear model based on a population spike code. In this model, idealized spikes encode the precise temporal positions and magnitudes of underlying acoustic features. We find that when the features are optimized for coding either natural sounds or speech, they show striking similarities to time-domain cochlear filter estimates, have a frequency-bandwidth dependence similar to that of auditory nerve fibres, and yield significantly greater coding efficiency than conventional signal representations. These results indicate that the auditory code might approach an information theoretic optimum and that the acoustic structure of speech might be adapted to the coding capacity of the mammalian auditory system.