Perceptual Learning

Perceptual learning is the specific and relatively permanent modification of perception and behaviour following sensory experience. This book presents advances made during the 1990s in this rapidly growing field.

A comprehensive and integrated introduction to the phenomena and theories of perceptual learning, focusing on the visual domain. Practice or training in perceptual tasks improves the quality of perceptual performance, often by a substantial amount. This improvement is called perceptual learning (in contrast to learning in the cognitive or motor domains), and it has become an active area of research of both theoretical and practical significance. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the phenomena and theories of perceptual learning, focusing on the visual domain. Perceptual Learning explores the tradeoff between the competing goals of system stability and system adaptability, signal and noise, retuning and reweighting, and top-down versus bottom-down processes. It examines and evaluates existing research and potential future directions, including evidence from behavior, physiology, and brain imaging, and existing perceptual learning applications, with a focus on important theories and computational models. It also compares visual learning to learning in other perceptual domains, and considers the application of visual training methods in the development of perceptual expertise and education as well as in remediation for limiting visual conditions. It provides an integrated treatment of the subject for students and researchers and for practitioners who want to incorporate perceptual learning into their practice.Practice or training in perceptual tasks improves the quality of perceptual performance, often by a substantial amount. This improvement is called perceptual learning, in contrast with learning in the cognitive or motor domains. Perceptual learning has been a very active area of research of both theoretical and practical interest. Research on perceptual learning is of theoretical significance in illuminating plasticity in adult perceptual systems, and in understanding the limitations of human information processing and how to improve them. It is of practical significance as a potential method for the development of perceptual expertise in the normal population, for its potential in advancing development and supporting healthy aging, and for noninvasive amelioration of deficits in challenged populations by training. Perceptual learning has become an increasingly important topic in biomedical research. Practitioners in this area include science disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, computer sciences, and optometry, and developers in applied areas of learning game design, cognitive development and aging, and military and biomedical applications. Commercial development of training products, protocols, and games is a multi-billion dollar industry. Perceptual learning provides the basis for many of the developments in these areas. This book is written for anyone who wants to understand the phenomena and theories of perceptual learning or to apply the technology of perceptual learning to the development of training methods and products. Our aim is to provide an introduction to those researchers and students just entering this exciting field, to provide a comprehensive and integrated treatment of the phenomena and the theories of perceptual learning for active perceptual learning researchers, and to describe and develop the basic techniques and principles for readers who want to successfully incorporate perceptual learning into applied developments. The book considers the special challenges of perceptual learning that balance the competing goals of system stability and system adaptability. It provides a systematic treatment of the major phenomena and models in perceptual learning, the determinants of successful learning and of specificity and transfer. The book provides a cohesive consideration of the broad range of perceptual learning through the theoretical framework of incremental learning of reweighting evidence that supports successful task performance. It provides a detailed analysis of the mechanisms by which perceptual learning improves perceptual limitations, the relationship of perceptual learning and the critical period of development, and the semi-supervised modes of learning that dominate perceptual learning. It considers limitations and constraints on learning multiple tasks and stimuli simultaneously, the implications of training at high or low levels of performance accuracy, and the importance of feedback to perceptual learning. The basis of perceptual learning in physiology is discussed along with the relationship of visual perceptual learning to learning in other sensory domains. The book considers the applications of perceptual learning in the development of expertise, in education and gaming, in training during development and aging, and applications to remediation of mental health and vision disorders. Finally, it applies the phenomena and models of perceptual learning to considerations of optimizing training.

The Psychology of Learning and Motivation publishes empirical and theoretical contributions in cognitive and experimental psychology, ranging from classical and instrumental conditioning to complex learning and problem solving. Each chapter provides a thoughtful integration of a body of work. Includes computational models of human learning Provides contributions from ten leading researchers in the field Contains interdisciplinary perspectives on perceptual learning Synthesizes research from psychology and computer science Focuses on the specific mechanisms that drive perceptual learning

Experts from wine tasters to radiologists to bird watchers have all undergone perceptual learning-long-term changes in perception that result from practice or experience. Philosophers have been discussing such cases for centuries, from the 14th-century Indian philosopher Vedanta Desika to the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, and into contemporary times. This book uses recent evidence from psychology and neuroscience to show that perceptual learning is genuinely perceptual, rather than post-perceptual. It also offers a taxonomy for classifying cases in the philosophical literature. In some cases, perceptual learning involves changes in how one attends; in other cases, it involves a learned ability to differentiate two properties, or to perceive two properties as unified. Connolly uses this taxonomy to rethink several domains of perception in terms of perceptual learning, including multisensory perception, color perception, and speech perception. As a whole, the book offers a theory of the function of perceptual learning. Perceptual learning embeds into our quick perceptual systems what would be a slower task were it to be done in a controlled, cognitive manner. A novice wine taster drinking a Cabernet Sauvignon might have to think about its features first and then infer the type of wine, while an expert can identify it immediately. This learned ability to immediately identify the wine enables the expert to think about other things like the vineyard or the vintage of the wine. More generally, perceptual learning serves to free up cognitive resources for other tasks. This book offers a comprehensive empirically-informed account, and explores the nature, scope, and theoretical implications of perceptual learning.

The essential nature of learning is primarily thought of as a verbal process or function, but this notion conveys that pre-linguistic infants do not learn. Far from being "blank slates" that passively absorb environmental stimuli, infants are active learners who perceptually engage their environments and extract information from them before language is available. The ecological approach to perceiving-defined as "a theory about perceiving by active creatures who look and listen and move around"-was spearheaded by Eleanor and James Gibson in the 1950s and culminated in James Gibson's last book in 1979. Until now, no comprehensive theoretical statement of ecological development has been published since Eleanor Gibson's Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development (1969). In An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development, distinguished experimental psychologists Eleanor J. Gibson and Anne D. Pick provide a unique theoretical framework for the ecological approach to understanding perceptual learning and development. Perception, in accordance with James Gibson's views, entails a reciprocal relationship between a person and his or her environment: The environment provides resources and opportunities for the person, and the person gets information from and acts on the environment. The concept of affordance is central to this idea; the person acts on what the environment affords, as it is appropriate. This extraordinary volume covers the development of perception in detail from birth through toddlerhood, beginning with the development of communication, going on to perceiving and acting on objects, and then to locomotion. It is more than a presentation of facts about perception as it develops. It outlines the ecological approach and shows how it underlies "higher" cognitive processes, such as concept formation, as well as discovery of the basic affordances of the environment. This impressive work should serve as the capstone for Eleanor J. Gibson's distinguished career as a developmental and experimental psychologist.

A comprehensive and integrated introduction to the phenomena and theories of perceptual learning, focusing on the visual domain. Practice or training in perceptual tasks improves the quality of perceptual performance, often by a substantial amount. This improvement is called perceptual learning (in contrast to learning in the cognitive or motor domains), and it has become an active area of research of both theoretical and practical significance. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the phenomena and theories of perceptual learning, focusing on the visual domain.

Experts from wine tasters to radiologists to bird watchers have all undergone perceptual learning-long-term changes in perception that result from practice or experience. Philosophers have been discussing such cases for centuries, from the 14th-century Indian philosopher Vedanta Desika to the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, and into contemporary times. This book uses recent evidence from psychology and neuroscience to show that perceptual learning is genuinely perceptual, rather than post-perceptual. It also offers a taxonomy for classifying cases in the philosophical literature. In some cases, perceptual learning involves changes in how one attends; in other cases, it involves a learned ability to differentiate two properties, or to perceive two properties as unified. Connolly uses this taxonomy to rethink several domains of perception in terms of perceptual learning, including multisensory perception, color perception, and speech perception. As a whole, the book offers a theory of the function of perceptual learning. Perceptual learning embeds into our quick perceptual systems what would be a slower task were it to be done in a controlled, cognitive manner. A novice wine taster drinking a Cabernet Sauvignon might have to think about its features first and then infer the type of wine, while an expert can identify it immediately. This learned ability to immediately identify the wine enables the expert to think about other things like the vineyard or the vintage of the wine. More generally, perceptual learning serves to free up cognitive resources for other tasks. This book offers a comprehensive empirically-informed account, and explores the nature, scope, and theoretical implications of perceptual learning.

Perceptual learning can be defined as a long lasting improvement in a perceptual skill following a systematic training, due to changes in brain plasticity at the level of sensory or perceptual areas. Its efficacy has been reported for a number of visual tasks, such as detection or discrimination of visual gratings (De Valois, 1977; Fiorentini & Berardi, 1980, 1981; Mayer, 1983), motion direction discrimination (Ball & Sekuler, 1982, 1987; Ball, Sekuler, & Machamer, 1983), orientation judgments (Fahle, 1997; Shiu & Pashler, 1992; Vogels & Orban, 1985), hyperacuity (Beard, Levi, & Reich, 1995; Bennett & Westheimer, 1991; Fahle, 1997; Fahle & Edelman, 1993; Kumar & Glaser, 1993; McKee & Westheimer, 1978; Saarinen & Levi, 1995), visual search tasks (Ahissar & Hochstein, 1996; Casco, Campana, & Gidiuli, 2001; Campana & Casco, 2003; Ellison & Walsh, 1998; Sireteanu & Rettenbach, 1995) or texture discrimination (Casco et al., 2004; Karni & Sagi, 1991, 1993). Perceptual learning is long-lasting and specific for basic stimulus features (orientation, retinal position, eye of presentation) suggesting a long-term modification at early stages of visual analysis, such as in the striate (Karni & Sagi, 1991; 1993; Saarinen & Levi, 1995; Pourtois et al., 2008) and extrastriate (Ahissar & Hochstein, 1996) visual cortex. Not confined to a basic research paradigm, perceptual learning has recently found application outside the laboratory environment, being used for clinical treatment of a series of visually impairing conditions such as amblyopia (Levi & Polat, 1996; Levi, 2005; Levi & Li, 2009, Polat et al., 2004; Zhou et al., 2006), myopia (Tan & Fong, 2008) or presbyopia (Polat, 2009). Different authors adopted different paradigms and stimuli in order to improve malfunctioning visual abilities, such as Vernier Acuity (Levi, Polat & Hu, 1997), Gratings detection (Zhou et al., 2006), oculomotor training (Rosengarth et al., 2013) and lateral interactions (Polat et al., 2004). The common result of these studies is that a specific training produces not only improvements in trained functions, but also in other, untrained and higher-level visual functions, such as visual acuity, contrast sensitivity and reading speed (Levi et al, 1997a, 1997b; Polat et al., 2004; Polat, 2009; Tan & Fong, 2008). More recently (Maniglia et al. 2011), perceptual learning with the lateral interactions paradigm has been successfully used for improving peripheral vision in normal people (by improving contrast sensitivity and reducing crowding, the interference in target discrimination due to the presence of close elements), offering fascinating new perspectives in the rehabilitation of people who suffer of central vision loss, such as maculopathy patients, partially overcoming the structural differences between fovea and periphery that limit the vision outside the fovea. One of the strongest point, and a distinguishing feature of perceptual learning, is that it does not just improve the subject’s performance, but produces changes in brain’s connectivity and efficiency, resulting in long-lasting, enduring neural changes. By tailoring the paradigms on each subject’s needs, perceptual learning could become the treatment of choice for the rehabilitation of visual functions, emerging as a simple procedure that doesn’t need expensive equipment.