Differentiating perceptual, procedural, and task learning for an auditory temporal discrimination task

Abstract

Perceptual or stimulus learning (PL) reflects experience-driven improvements in the ability to detect changes in stimulus characteristics. The time course for PL overlaps with that for procedural learning (acquiring general skills and strategies) and task learning (learning the perceptual judgment specific to the task), making it difficult to isolate their individual effects. This study was conducted to examine the impact of exposure to stimulus, procedure, and task information on learning for auditory temporal-interval discrimination. Eighty-three listeners completed multiple sessions requiring auditory temporal-interval discrimination (target learning task), but before these sessions listeners were exposed to one of three conditions that differed by the information conveyed about the target task’s stimulus, procedure, or task characteristics. Significant learning occurred but an exposure effect was not found when examined across sessions. However, percentage improvement scores (initial to final) revealed that listeners exposed to elements of the target task demonstrated larger percentage improvements on that task compared to naïve listeners without any prior experience in a manner that suggested that stimulus and procedural learning were possible drivers of temporal learning. These findings could clarify the influence of experience on temporal PL and inform future research aimed at developing training paradigms that optimize perceptual improvements.