Improvement in vernier acuity with practice

McKee, Suzanne P.; Westhe, Gerald

doi:10.3758/bf03206097

Cited by 287 publications

(142 citation statements)

References 15 publications

(13 reference statements)

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“…The latter factor had not been considered in the design of the experiment. Since the analysis for each subcondition was based on the last 101 of the 320 trials, the present findings would not appear attributable to lack of practice (see McKee & Westheimer, 1978). It has been shown (Farrell, 1979) that left-right judgments of position have a longer RT than up-down judgments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%

Reaction time for horizontal versus vertical line-length discrimination

Gottsdanker

Tietz

1992

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

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In an experiment with 8 men and women, a small but statistically significant effect on reaction time (RT) was found with respect to horizontal versus vertical line-length discrimination. This effect was in the form of a cr088ing interaction between axis of orientation and the short-long ratio ofline lengths. With a relatively high value of this ratio (the more difficult discrimination), horizontal choice was faster; with a lower value, vertical choice was faster. An interpretation of the cro88ing interaction is that two opposing factors were involved: greater horizontal than vertical sensitivity and greater left-right than up-down ambivalence. It is recommended that in RT experiments comparing parallel and orthogonal stimulus-response mapping, all four combinations of horizontal and vertical stimulus and response axes be employed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%

Reaction time for horizontal versus vertical line-length discrimination

Gottsdanker

Tietz

1992

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

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“…Most investigations of perceptual learning have examined the discrimination of visual spatial patterns (Sagi and Tanne, 1994), including vernier acuity (McKee and Westheimer, 1978;Beard et al, 1995;Fahle et al, 1995;Poggio et al, 1995;Saarinen and Levi, 1995), spatial frequency discrimination Berardi, 1980, 1981), and orientation discrimination (Vogels and Orban, 1985;Karni and Sagi, 1991). Two main conclusions can be drawn from these studies.…”

Section: Temporal Versus Spatial Perceptual Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning and Generalization of Auditory Temporal–Interval Discrimination in Humans

et al. 1997

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The sensory encoding of the duration, interval, and order of different stimulus features provides vital information to the nervous system. The present study focuses on the influence of practice on auditory temporal-interval discrimination. The goals of the experiment were to determine (1) whether practice improved the ability to discriminate a standard interval of 100 msec bounded by brief 1 kHz tones from longer intervals, and, if so, (2) whether this improvement generalized to different tonal frequencies or temporal intervals. Learning was examined in 14 human subjects using an adaptive, two-alternative, forcedchoice procedure. One hour of training per day for 10 d led to marked improvements in the ability to discriminate between the standard and longer intervals. The generalization of learning was evaluated by independently varying the spectral (tonal frequency) and temporal (interval) components of the stimuli in four conditions tested both before and after the training phase. Remarkably, there was complete generalization to the trained interval of 100 msec bounded by tones at the untrained frequency of 4 kHz, but no generalization to the untrained intervals of 50, 200, or 500 msec bounded by tones at the trained frequency of 1 kHz. Thus, these data show that (1) temporalinterval discrimination using a 100-msec standard undergoes perceptual learning, and (2) the neural mechanisms underlying this learning are temporally, but not spectrally, specific. These results are compared with those from previous investigations of learning in visual spatial tasks, and are discussed in relation to biologically plausible models of temporal processing. Key words: psychophysics; hearing; perceptual learning; auditory processing; temporal processing; humanThe sensory encoding of temporal information such as the duration, interval, and order of different stimulus features provides vital information to the nervous system. This is clearly illustrated by the ever-increasing evidence of the importance of temporal cues in the perception of speech. The identification of individual consonant-vowel syllables correlates with the interval between air release and vocal cord vibration (e.g., "ba" versus "pa"; Lisker and Abramson, 1964), the duration of frequency transitions (e.g., "ba" versus "wa"; Liberman et al., 1956), and the silent time between consonants and vowels (e.g., "sa" versus "sta"; Dorman et al., 1979). Furthermore, prosodic cues such as pauses, the duration of speech segments, and speaking rate influence semantic content (Lehiste et al., 1976). Indeed, speech can still be understood even when the available cues are primarily temporal (Shannon et al., 1995), but not when the temporal cues are removed either by manipulations of the speech signal (Drullman et al., 1994a,b) or by impairments of temporal processing in the perceiver (Tallal and Piercy, 1973).Most of the temporal cues involved in speech perception fall on a time scale of tens to hundreds of milliseconds. Relatively little is known about the neural mechanisms und...

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“…In the visual modality, marked improvements in performance have in particular been demonstrated for vernier acuity (Beard, Levi, & Reich, 1995;McKee & Westheimer, 1978;Saarinen & Levi, 1995), spatial frequency discrimination (Fiorentini & Berardi, 1980, orientation discrimination (Karni & Sagi, 1991;Vogels & Orban, 1985), texture discrimination (Karni & Sagi, 1993), and motion discrimination (Ball & Sekuler, 1982. In the somatosensory modality, improvements in tactilediscrimination performance over time have been reported (Sathian & Zangaladze, 1997;Spengler et al, 1997).…”

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confidence: 98%

Transfer of learning across durations and ears in auditory frequency discrimination

Delhommeau

Micheyl

Jouvent

et al. 2002

Perception & Psychophysics

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Frequency-discriminationthresholds (FDTs) for 1-kHz tone pips with durations of 40, 100, and 200 msec were measured in the left and right ears of 10 normal-hearing listeners,before and after six 2-h frequencydiscrimination training sessions involving, exclusively, the 200-msec duration and the right ear. In the trained ear, highly significant improvements in FDTs were observed at all durations. Further inspection of the data suggested complete generalizationbetween 200 and 100 msec, but not at 40 msec. Posttraining FDTs were not found to differ between the two ears for the two untrained durations, but proved significantly smaller in the right (trained) than in the left (untrained) ear at the trained (200-msec) duration only. A control experiment involving 10 additional subjects allowed us to establish the absence of intrinsic differences in pretraining FDTs between the right and left ears. Overall, these findings indicate that frequency-discriminationlearning generalizeswidely across stimulus durations and across ears, but that part of the improvement is specific to the range of durations and to the ear used in training.

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Improvement in vernier acuity with practice

Cited by 287 publications

References 15 publications

Reaction time for horizontal versus vertical line-length discrimination

Reaction time for horizontal versus vertical line-length discrimination

Learning and Generalization of Auditory Temporal–Interval Discrimination in Humans

Transfer of learning across durations and ears in auditory frequency discrimination

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