Abstract
The brain has evolved to extract behaviourally meaningful information from the environment. For example, it has been shown that visual perceptual learning (VPL) can occur for task-irrelevant stimulus features when those features are consistently paired with internal or external reinforcement signals. It is, however, unclear whether or not task-irrelevant VPL is influenced by stimulus features that are unrelated to reinforcement in a given sensory context. To address this question, we exposed participants to task-irrelevant and subliminal coherent motion stimuli in the background while they performed a central character identification task. A specific motion direction was consistently paired with the task-targets, while two other directions occurred only with distractors and, thus, were unrelated to reinforcement. We found that the magnitude of VPL of the target-paired direction was significantly greater when the distractor-paired directions were close to the target-paired direction, compared to when they were farther. Thus, even very weak signals that are both subliminal and unrelated to reinforcement are processed and exert an influence on VPL. This finding suggests that the outcome of VPL depends on the sensory context in which learning takes place and calls for a refinement of VPL theories to incorporate exposure-based influences on learning.
Highlights
Visual perceptual learning (VPL) is defined as a long-term improvement in the ability to perform a perceptual task as a result of perceptual experience and is regarded as a manifestation of plasticity in a perceptual system and the brain[1,2]
We focused our analysis on visual perceptual learning (VPL) effects at 0° and ±60°
In the 5% coherence condition, performance in both groups was largely unchanged at posttest, except that in the “small” group there appeared to be a performance increase at ±90°. This effect, which might indicate VPL of the motion direction that was orthogonal to the target-paired direction in this group, was driven to a larger extent by two outlier values
Summary
Visual perceptual learning (VPL) is defined as a long-term improvement in the ability to perform a perceptual task as a result of perceptual experience and is regarded as a manifestation of plasticity in a perceptual system and the brain[1,2]. It was assumed that target recognition in the RSVP task caused an internal reward signal that drove learning of the target-paired coherent motion direction, while distractor-paired motion directions were unrelated to reward signals and were not learned[12,14] In line with this assumption, it has been shown that VPL occurs in the absence of a task when the feature is paired with an external reward[17]. The emphasis of current theories of task-irrelevant VPL on a temporal relationship between reinforcement signals and stimulus feature exposure shares similarities with the concept of classical conditioning[14,18] In classical conditioning, it is well-known that the specificity of learning strongly depends on the presence of stimuli that are consistently not paired with a reinforcer, an effect known as discriminative conditioning[19]. The reinforcement theory in its current form cannot explain these results and needs to be modified
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