Abstract
Perceptual learning is often orientation and location specific, which may indicate neuronal plasticity in early visual areas. However, learning specificity diminishes with additional exposure of the transfer orientation or location via irrelevant tasks, suggesting that the specificity is related to untrained conditions, likely because neurons representing untrained conditions are neither bottom-up stimulated nor top-down attended during training. To demonstrate these top-down and bottom-up contributions, we applied a "continuous flash suppression" technique to suppress the exposure stimulus into sub-consciousness, and with additional manipulations to achieve pure bottom-up stimulation or top-down attention with the transfer condition. We found that either bottom-up or top-down influences enabled significant transfer of orientation and Vernier discrimination learning. These results suggest that learning specificity may result from under-activations of untrained visual neurons due to insufficient bottom-up stimulation and/or top-down attention during training. High-level perceptual learning thus may not functionally connect to these neurons for learning transfer.
Highlights
Visual perceptual learning is the process in which the observers improve their discrimination of fine differences of basic visual features, such as contrast, orientation, motion direction, etc., through practice
For several decades visual perceptual learning has been regarded as a distinct format of learning because it is specific to the orientation and retinal location of the trained stimulus (Schoups et al, 1995; Ahissar and Hochstein, 1997; Shiu and Pashler, 1992; Dosher and Lu, 1998; Poggio et al, 1992; Fiorentini and Berardi, 1980; Yu et al, 2004)
It has been proposed that training could sharpen neuronal orientation tuning in the primary visual cortex (V1), so that neurons become more sensitive to the fine changes of orientation differences (Teich and Qian, 2003; Schoups et al, 2001)
Summary
Visual perceptual learning is the process in which the observers improve their discrimination of fine differences of basic visual features, such as contrast, orientation, motion direction, etc., through practice. For several decades visual perceptual learning has been regarded as a distinct format of learning because it is specific to the orientation and retinal location of the trained stimulus (Schoups et al, 1995; Ahissar and Hochstein, 1997; Shiu and Pashler, 1992; Dosher and Lu, 1998; Poggio et al, 1992; Fiorentini and Berardi, 1980; Yu et al, 2004). The learning specificity has constrained alternative reweighting theories of visual perceptual learning (Dosher and Lu, 1998; Poggio et al, 1992; Yu et al, 2004; Mollon and Danilova, 1996; Petrov et al, 2005; Law and Gold, 2008; 2009) These theories propose that training may not change the tuning properties of sensory neurons.
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