Perceptual Learning: Effects and Mechanisms

各领域的专家（例如，专业的品酒师，有经验的放射技师）显示出非专家无法做到的精细辨别能力。这类技能的获得是经验的结果，部分是通过明确的培训（如专家指导他的学徒），但也仅仅是由于适当地接触要区分的项目/比较两种葡萄酒或两种图像的机会在这里似乎是至关重要的。这种感知学习效应可以在实验室中得到证明--天真的个体，面对最初难以区分的复杂视觉显示，当以允许不同显示之间进行比较的方式进行安排时，在重复暴露后能够区分它们。我们的建议利用这个实验室程序来回答关于知觉学习的两个基本问题。首先，刺激的经验使它被不同地感知。但是，感知刺激的变化本质是什么？我们计划做一些实验来验证这一观点，即对于有经验的观察者来说，刺激的独特特征会变得突出并吸引注意力，而刺激显示的其他方面则会失去效果。其次，我们想知道这种学习形式的机制。什么样的学习过程负责改变刺激的感知效果？先前的研究表明，动物学习研究中获得的感知学习效果可以通过非常简单的学习过程（具体来说，就是习惯化和联想形成）产生。我们的实验将测试这些概念在人类案例中的应用。

Experts in a variety of fields (e.g., professional wine-tasters, experienced radiographers) show the ability to make fine discriminations that nonexperts find impossible. Skills of this sort are acquired as a result of experience, partly by way of explicit training (as when an expert instructs his apprentice), but also simply as a consequence of appropriate exposure to the items to be discriminated / the opportunity to compare two wines, or two images appears to be critical here. This perceptual learning effect can be demonstrated in the laboratory -- naive individuals, presented with complex visual displays that are initially indistinguishable, become able to tell them apart after repeated exposure when this is arranged in a way that allows comparison between different displays. Our proposal makes use of this laboratory procedure to answer two basic questions about perceptual learning. First, experience with the stimulus allows it to be perceived differently. But what is the nature of the change in the perceived stimulus? We plan to do experiments that will test the suggestion that, for the experienced observer, the distinctive features of the stimulus come to stand out and attract attention, whereas other aspects of the stimulus display lose effectiveness. Second, we want to know about the mechanisms that are responsible for this form of learning. What learning processes are responsible for changing the perceptual effectiveness of a stimulus? Previous work has shown that perceptual learning effects obtained in studies of animal learning can be generated by the operation of very simple learning processes (specifically, those known as habituation and association formation). Our experiments will test the application of these concepts to the human case.