Practice improves adults' sensitivity to diagonals

Mayer, Melanie J.

doi:10.1016/0042-6989(83)90130-x

Cited by 69 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Optimal channel selection is inherently specific to retinal location, spatial frequency, and orientation (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8). The observations of specificity of learning to retinal location or stimulus, which have been used in the past to argue for adult plasticity in visual system (1)(2)(3)10), are consistent with reweighting of inputs from retinally specific channels.…”

Section: Psychology: Dosher and Lumentioning

confidence: 79%

“…Previous studies (1-13) of visual tasks for adult observers evaluated perceptual learning in the absence of environmental noise, corresponding to the single zero external noise points in our data (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12). Evaluation of performance over levels of external noise both extends the conditions of perceptual learning and provides key tests of three distinct mechanisms of perceptual learning that any model must address.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Perceptual learning specific to retinal position (1, 2), orientation (3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8), or scale (9-13) has been claimed to reflect plasticity in the adult early visual system (1,2,11,12). But what is the nature of this plasticity?…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Perceptual learning reflects external noise filtering and internal noise reduction through channel reweighting

Dosher

Lü

1998

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

483

569

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To investigate the nature of plasticity in the adult visual system, perceptual learning was measured in a peripheral orientation discrimination task with systematically varying amounts of external (environmental) noise. The signal contrasts required to achieve threshold were reduced by a factor or two or more after training at all levels of external noise. The strong quantitative regularities revealed by this novel paradigm ruled out changes in multiplicative internal noise, changes in transducer nonlinearites, and simple attentional tradeoffs. Instead, the regularities specify the mechanisms of perceptual learning at the behavioral level as a combination of external noise exclusion and stimulus enhancement via additive internal noise reduction. The findings also constrain the neural architecture of perceptual learning. Plasticity in the weights between basic visual channels and decision is sufficient to account for perceptual learning without requiring the retuning of visual mechanisms.

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Section: Psychology: Dosher and Lumentioning

confidence: 79%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Perceptual learning reflects external noise filtering and internal noise reduction through channel reweighting

Dosher

Lü

1998

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

483

569

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“…Practice improves detection of a Gabor (14). This learning is specific to the trained stimulus and location (15,16).…”

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confidence: 90%

Learning to detect and combine the features of an object

Suchow¹,

Pelli²

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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To recognize an object, it is widely supposed that we first detect and then combine its features. Familiar objects are recognized effortlessly, but unfamiliar objects-like new faces or foreignlanguage letters-are hard to distinguish and must be learned through practice. Here, we describe a method that separates detection and combination and reveals how each improves as the observer learns. We dissociate the steps by two independent manipulations: For each step, we do or do not provide a bionic crutch that performs it optimally. Thus, the two steps may be performed solely by the human, solely by the crutches, or cooperatively, when the human takes one step and a crutch takes the other. The crutches reveal a double dissociation between detecting and combining. Relative to the two-step ideal, the human observer's overall efficiency for unconstrained identification equals the product of the efficiencies with which the human performs the steps separately. The twostep strategy is inefficient: Constraining the ideal to take two steps roughly halves its identification efficiency. In contrast, we find that humans constrained to take two steps perform just as well as when unconstrained, which suggests that they normally take two steps. Measuring threshold contrast (the faintness of a barely identifiable letter) as it improves with practice, we find that detection is inefficient and learned slowly. Combining is learned at a rate that is 4× higher and, after 1,000 trials, 7× more efficient. This difference explains much of the diversity of rates reported in perceptual learning studies, including effects of complexity and familiarity.object recognition | sensitivity | letter identification

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“…Studies of perceptual learning date to the origins of sensory science (see discussions in Ahissar & Hochstein, 1998;Sinha & Poggio, 2002), and improvements have been demonstrated in a variety of tasks (Ball & Sekuler, 1987;Fendick & Westheimer, 1983;Karni & Sagi, 1993;McKee & Westheimer, 1978), including contrast detection and discrimination (De Valois, 1977;Dorais & Sagi, 1997;Fiorentini & Berardi, 1981;Mayer, 1983;Sagi & Tanne, 1994;Sowden, Davies, & Roling, 2000;Yu, Klein, & Levi, 2004). Given often high degrees of stimulus specificity, theoretical accounts of perceptual learning have tended to emphasize low-level, feedforward mechanisms (although see Ahissar & Hochstein, 2002;Petrov, Dosher, & Lu, 2005).…”

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confidence: 99%

Perceptual learning in contrast detection: presence and cost of shifts in response criteria

Wenger

Rasche

2006

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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Contemporary theoretical accounts of perceptual learning typically assume that observers are either unbiased or stably biased across the course of learning. However, standard methods for estimating thresholds, as they are typically used, do not allow this assumption to be tested. We present an approach that allows for this test specific to perceptual learning for contrast detection. We show that reliable decreases in detection thresholds and increases in hit rates are not uniformly accompanied by reliable increases in sensitivity (d ), but are regularly accompanied by reliable liberal shifts in response criteria (c). In addition, we estimate the extent to which sensitivity could have increased in the absence of these liberal shifts. The results pose a challenge to the assumption that perceptual learning has limited or no impact on response criteria.

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Practice improves adults' sensitivity to diagonals

Cited by 69 publications

References 18 publications

Perceptual learning reflects external noise filtering and internal noise reduction through channel reweighting

Perceptual learning reflects external noise filtering and internal noise reduction through channel reweighting

Learning to detect and combine the features of an object

Perceptual learning in contrast detection: presence and cost of shifts in response criteria

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