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Perceptual Learning

Most people are all familiar with the phenomenon of having their performance improve over time with practice. Perceptual learning refers to the changes that take place within sensory and perceptual systems as a result of practice performing a perceptual task. Such changes can take place at both the levels of behavior and physiology, and recent work has demonstrated that adult perceptual systems can exhibit a large degree of mutability as a result of extended stimulation through training. This entry explores the background, psychophysics, physiology, and complexity of perceptual learning.

Background

Until relatively recently, it was generally assumed that perceptual learning was a phenomenon that was restricted to the early stages of human development or was attributable to changes in higher-level cognitive processes. In the case of development, a great deal of neural tuning and reorganization takes place during early childhood, and many experiments have shown that perceptual experience (or lack thereof) during this time can play a large role in permanently shaping the properties of neural mechanisms. After this critical period during perceptual development passes, it was traditionally assumed that neural mechanisms at the earliest stages of information processing were no longer plastic and thus could not be modified through experience with the world. In the case of adult perceptual learning, it was generally assumed that changes in high-level cognitive processes (e.g., shifts in decision criteria, attention, strategy) were responsible for improvements in perceptual performance with practice. However, an explosion of recent work has demonstrated that there is, in fact, a great deal of mutability in adult perceptual systems, and these changes often occur at very low levels of processing.

Many of the tasks that we might think of where practice produces improvements in performance are relatively complex, such as learning how to drive a car or ride a bike. There are certainly perceptual components to the learning that is taking place in such complex tasks. But it turns out that our ability to perform extremely simple perceptual tasks with simple stimuli can also dramatically improve with practice. It also turns out that, with the right kinds of psychophysical and physiological experiments, these simple tasks and stimuli can tell us a great deal about the changes that are occurring within a perceptual system as learning is taking place. As such, the majority of research on perceptual learning has focused on these simple tasks and stimuli.

Psychophysics

Psychophysical techniques are designed to allow one to make inferences about the inner workings of a perceptual system just by observing the responses that the system as a whole makes to carefully constructed stimuli. Psychophysical techniques have been used extensively to try to identify the kinds of processing changes that take place with practice in a wide variety of perceptual tasks. Many of these tasks are used because they are thought to tap into the workings of relatively basic perceptual mechanisms. As an illustrative example, consider the extensive amount of work that has been devoted to exploring the impact of training on performance in a task called vernier acuity. Imagine a horizontal line drawn in front of you; now imagine splitting that line into two equal halves and slightly shifting one of the halves up or down relative to the other half. How much would you need to shift the line so that you could just barely detect that it no longer lined up with its neighbor? Under optimal conditions, the amount of displacement that you would need to perform this task is shockingly small—significantly less than the size of a single photoreceptor in your eye. What's even more amazing is that performance in this task can greatly improve with practice.

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