What underlies the hand of the beholder: The role of cognition in subliminal perception and in perceptual learning

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event What underlies the hand of the beholder: The role of cognition in subliminal perception and in perceptual learning Dror D. Lev1, Marcos Hilsenrat1 and Miriam Reiner1* 1 Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Department of Education in Technology and Science, Israel A central methodology in science learning is based on sensory learning in the lab. What one perceives is based on one's sensory experience but is also coupled with what one is expecting to perceive. The relationships between bottom-up sensation processing and top-down strategic influences on perception are still under study. Cognition can affect perception by top-down processes that influence the focus of attention (to relevant aspects of the environment, thus increasing sensitivity) or by increasing readiness towards an expected kind of stimuli (changing the response-bias). Twenty-six participants, working in a visuo-haptic virtual environment, were asked to haptically explore two virtual surfaces subliminally differing in roughness and discriminate them first by personal preference and then by explicitly recognizing the smoother. Another set of twenty-six participants replicated the procedure with stiffness subliminal difference. Results demonstrate subliminal perception of stiffness and roughness by showing significantly higher than chance preference judgments paralleled by chance level explicit discrimination judgments. Applying signal-detection theory to the results reveals changes in both sensitivity (bottom-up) and response-bias (strategic top-down). Thus, the enhanced perceptual performance of preference judgments is driven by differences in both bottom-up and top-down processing. Apparently, the preference task processing is dominated, due to top-down cognitive control, by sub-cortical pathways other then the pathways that dominate processing in the explicit discrimination task. Arguably, training in the enhanced implicit subliminal perception condition may induce better learning than training with subliminal stimuli in the explicit discrimination task. This hypothesis is supported by findings from subliminal perceptual learning that exposure to unattended stimuli induce subsequent enhanced perceptual performance because they do not invoke the top-down inhibitory control of the lateral prefrontal cortex during practice. Consequently, learning can occur in sensory areas. Conference: EARLI SIG22 - Neuroscience and Education, Zurich, Switzerland, 3 Jun - 5 Jun, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Science learning Citation: Lev DD, Hilsenrat M and Reiner M (2010). What underlies the hand of the beholder: The role of cognition in subliminal perception and in perceptual learning. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: EARLI SIG22 - Neuroscience and Education. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.11.00066 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 31 May 2010; Published Online: 31 May 2010. * Correspondence: Miriam Reiner, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Department of Education in Technology and Science, Haifa, Israel, miriamr@technion.ac.il Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Dror D Lev Marcos Hilsenrat Miriam Reiner Google Dror D Lev Marcos Hilsenrat Miriam Reiner Google Scholar Dror D Lev Marcos Hilsenrat Miriam Reiner PubMed Dror D Lev Marcos Hilsenrat Miriam Reiner Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.