The impact of orienting attention in fast task-irrelevant perceptual learning

Abstract

Task-irrelevant perceptual learning (TIPL) refers to the phenomenon where the stimulus features are learned when they are consistently presented at behaviorally relevant times (e.g., with task targets or rewards). Studies on the role of attention in TIPL have found that attention negatively impacts this type of learning; however, these studies involved stimuli that were completely irrelevant to the subjects and that, when noticed, were distracting to the subjects' task. Here, we asked whether attention would have a beneficial impact on learning in the case where the target-paired stimuli were relevant to a secondary task that subjects were required to perform. We conducted three experiments in adult subjects, using the fast-TIPL paradigm (which allows one to study TIPL with as little as a single trial of exposure). The results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that fast-TIPL occurred for the target-paired stimuli but that the manipulation of attention increased performance for stimuli presented after the target. Experiment 3 was conducted to address whether the direction of attention positively or negatively impacted fast-TIPL and to better control for the effects of attention. The results of this experiment demonstrate that in the case of fast-TIPL, exogenously directed attention aids in the memorization of target-paired stimuli. Overall, our results demonstrate that attention operates in a beneficial manner in fast-TIPL, where the target-paired stimuli are relevant to a secondary task that subjects perform.

Pupillometry as a Glimpse into the Neurochemical Basis of Human Memory Encoding

“…These results are consistent with previous findings of fast-TIL where prolonged benefits for scenes were found after the presentation of a target-arrow, which was similarly thought to alert participants to the RSVP stream of scenes (Leclercq & Seitz, 2012d). This result is also in line with findings from Murphy et al (2011) where large pupil-dilations led to an increase in performance followed by a diminishing baseline pupil-size and decreased performance in the context of an oddball task where a key was pressed when an unpredictable sound occurred.…”

“…R. Seitz & Watanabe, 2003; Watanabe et al, 2001), recent research of fast task-irrelevant learning (fast-TIL) (Leclercq & Seitz, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2012d; Lin, Pype, Murray, & Boynton, 2010; Swallow & Jiang, 2010) shows increased memorization of images even after a single pairing with a target of a target detection task. We note, that “task-irrelevant” in the context of fast-TIL is used to maintain consistent terminology with prior works on the topic and refers to the fact that the memorized images have no predictive relationship to presentation of targets of the target-detection task, nor are the targets informative of which scene will be tested in the scene-recognition task.…”

Fast-TIPL Occurs for Salient Images without a Memorization Requirement in Men but Not in Women

“…Thus, the processing of the images without explicit memorization is sufficient for target-pairing to benefit to the later recall of those images. These results are highly consistent with previous findings of TIPL: inhibition of target-paired stimuli is found for salient, irrelevant, and distracting stimuli [10], [11], but facilitation is found for stimuli that are relevant to another task, although still irrelevant for the main RSVP task that the subjects are conducting [21]. This observation is consistent with recent models of TIPL [5], [9] that suggest that attentional signals can either enhance or suppress Perceptual Learning (both task-relevant and task-irrelevant) depending on whether those stimuli are distracting or not to the subjects' objectives.…”

Perceptual Learning: Toward a Comprehensive Theory

“…We call this new type of VPL task-irrelevant VPL. A number of subsequent studies have reported task-irrelevant VPL (Barbot et al 2011, Baumann et al 2008, Beste & Dinse 2013, Beste et al 2011, Carrasco et al 2008, Gutnisky et al 2009, Leclercq et al 2013, Leclercq & Seitz 2012, Rosenthal & Humphreys 2010, Seitz & Watanabe 2005, Seitz & Watanabe 2003, Seitz et al 2005b, Tsushima et al 2008, Watanabe et al 2002, Xu et al 2012b, Zhang & Kourtzi 2010, Zhang et al 2010b). …”