Direction selective habituation of motion adaptation

Abstract

# Both adaptation and perceptual learning can change how we perceive the visual environment, reflecting the plasticity of the visual system. Our previous work has investigated the interaction between the two aspects of visual plasticity. One of the main findings is that multiple days of repeated motion adaptation attenuates motion aftereffect, which is explained by habituation of motion adaptation. Interestingly, there was almost no transfer of the effect to the untrained adapter, which differed from the trained adapter in the features including retinotopic location, spatiotopic location, and motion direction. Given that the reference frame of motion aftereffect is proposed to be retinotopic, it remains unclear whether the effect we refer to as habituation effect of motion adaptation is more like a special type of motion adaptation or not. Therefore, in three experiments, we examined the role of retinotopic location, spatiotopic location, and motion direction on the transfer of habituation, respectively. In each experiment, only one of the features was kept the same for the trained and untrained conditions. We found that the habituation effect transferred across both the retinotopic and spatiotopic locations as long as the adapting direction remained the same. The findings indicate that the effect we refer to as habituation of motion adaptation is anchored neither in eye-centered (retinotopic) nor world-centered (spatiotopic) coordinates. Rather, it is specific to the direction of the adapter. Therefore, the habituation effect of motion adaptation cannot be ascribed to a variant of motion adaptation.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Downloaded from jov.arvojournals.org on 07/09/2020

Repeated Contrast Adaptation Does Not Cause Habituation of the Adapter

“…Given the differences in the research paradigms and features, adaptation and perceptual learning were mostly explored as independent processes. Nevertheless, some recent studies, including ours, suggest that repeated exposure to the adapter or training of an adapter-related visual task could affect the adaptation effect (Yehezkel et al, 2010;Haak et al, 2014;Dong et al, 2016;Engel et al, 2016;Pinchuk-Yacobi et al, 2016;Dong and Bao, 2019), implying the interactive relationship between perceptual learning and adaptation.…”

“…In those studies, participants wore the lens or goggles and continuously adapted to an altered visual environment for several hours or days. Whereas in our experiments, an adapting session lasted only for 20-40 min with some tests interspersed among them (Dong et al, 2016;Dong and Bao, 2019). The more prolonged and sustained adapting visual environment is more likely to be regarded as a new normal state.…”

“…Based on the behavioral evidence in our previous study (Dong et al, 2016;Dong and Bao, 2019) that the contrast or motion adaptation effect attenuated after training, we speculated that repeated exposure to the trained adapter would result in habituation to the adapter or habituation to the adaption mechanism. The current study specifically aimed at examining the former explanation.…”

“…We called this procedure training of adaptation. By comparing the adaptation effect before and after training, we found that the adaptation effect attenuated after training (Dong et al, 2016;Dong and Bao, 2019). Since the reduced adaptation effect was due to repeated exposure to the adapter, we proposed a likely explanation for this phenomenon, habituation, which is referred to as response decrement as a result of repeated stimulation (Thompson and Spencer, 1966;Rankin et al, 2009;Thompson, 2009).…”