Acquisition Of Perceptual Skills Research Articles

Learning to become an expert: reinforcement learning and the acquisition of perceptual expertise

Acquisition of perceptual skills is of vital importance as it enables identification of objects in the environment. With training and experience, it is possible to get specialized at recognizing a particular category of objects. The research on perceptual expertise has mostly contrasted performances and brain areas between experts and novices. The differences in perceptual capabilities between the experts and the novices rely on learning of implicit rules for categorization of objects1 and 2 maintaining the domain-specific information in the working memory. There is evidence that acquisition of expertise is associated with activations in ventral visual stream, especially in the fusiform gyrus, the lateral occipital cortex and inferior temporal cortex. doi : 10.5214/ans.0972.7531.1118307

Differential effects of aging on explicit and implicit memory

In the present study, five consecutive age groups ranging from the 20s to the 60s were compared on a range of explicit and implicit memory tests which were modelled on the clinical tasks used to assess amnesia. With respect to explicit memory, the ability to recall verbal or visual material was seen to decline steadily with increasing age at immediate and delayed testing; there were, however, no consistent age differences regarding performance on recognition tasks. Perceptual skill acquisition within the context of a mirror reading task was unaffected by age, while word stem completion priming tended to decline across the age groups. Factor analysis revealed three factors: verbal explicit memory, visual memory (comprising visual recall and stem completion priming), and skill acquisition. the present findings indicate dissociable effects of normal aging on explicit and implicit memory, and thereby some degree of qualitative resemblance to human amnesia.

Memory and Skill Acquisition in Parkinson's Disease and Frontal Lobe Dysfunction

Animal experiments and human neuropsychological studies have provided evidence for the hypothesis that skill acquisition may be regulated by the basal ganglia. In the present studies, perceptual and cognitive skill acquisition as well as a number of explicit verbal memory functions were investigated in patients in early and more advanced stages of Parkinson's disease (PD) and in patients with frontal lobe lesions. Patients in more advanced stages of PD were impaired at cognitive skill acquisition as well as during recall conditions that involved active semantic organisation of the stimulus material. Similar explicit memory deficits were present in frontally lesioned patients. PD patients with unilateral symptoms showed a selective impairment in acquiring a cognitive skill. Perceptual skill acquisition was preserved in all groups. The overall pattern of memory impairment in PD is largely consistent with dysfunction of fronto-striatal circuitry.

Cerebral hemispheric involvement in the acquisition of new phonetic categories

This study was concerned with the involvement of the cerebral hemispheres in the acquisition of perceptual skill with novel speech sounds. Two groups of eight subjects rated on three occasions the dissimilarity of pairs of Mandarin Chinese speech sounds varying on voicing and aspiration, presented to the left or right ear with contralateral noise. The experimental group received listening experience with long passages of Mandarin containing the target sounds. Multidimensional scaling analysis of dissimilarity ratings indicated that listening experience leads to increased perceptual differentiation of phonetic categories drawn from a language unfamiliar to the listener. This improvement occurred sooner with presentation of the target sounds to the right hemisphere than to the left if the phonological contrast was along the voicing dimension. Improvement in the perception of stimuli varying on aspiration occurred in right ear presentations only. This finding supports the position that speech perception mechanisms at the feature level may be distributed asymmetrically across the hemispheres.

Auditory-Vocal Activation

Deficits and strengths in the acquisition of perceptual skills are apparent in the child with specific language disabilities (SLD). We feel that proficiency in receptive and expressive language is based on the attainment and integration of perceptual skills and conceptualizations. Furthermore, reading, writing, and spelling require the ability to comprehend and express language. The individual differences of SLD children must be met by exploring their responses to auditory-vocal stimuli in their acquisition of reading, writing, and spelling. Methods are presented and discussed, followed by a case report of method application.