Psychophysical analyses of perceptual learning

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My research examines the factors that determine how we perceive visual patterns, and the way those factors are affected by perceptual learning. Perceptual learning refers to the fact that our ability to detect, discriminate, and identify patterns improves as a result of practice. Studying perceptual learning can provide insights into the general principles of learning and memory, and into the ways our brain adapts and changes as a function of experience. This knowledge could be used to devise ways of improving skills in applied areas requiring a high degree of visual skill (e.g., radiology and medical imaging), or perhaps to alleviate visual deficits associated with neural disorders such as amblyopia, brain injuries, or the effects of aging. Many experiments examine how perceptual learning improves our ability to perform simple discrimination tasks that require us to two patterns that differ on a single dimension (e.g., orientation). However, my research examines how learning alters our ability to identify complex patterns like faces. learning on identification, rather than discrimination, of spatially complex targets like textures and faces. One obvious reason for using more complex patterns is that they may provide better insights into the way learning affects our perception of naturalistic patterns, textures, and objects (as well as important classes of "artificial" patterns such as radiographic images). Also, investigating learning with progressively more complex stimuli and/or tasks is necessary to determine how theories of learning must be altered to account for learning in a variety of conditions. Therefore, the current proposal describes several projects that examine the similarities and differences between perceptual learning obtained with simple and complex stimuli and tasks to clarify the nature of the processes that underlie perception and how those processes are altered by practice.