The Mechanisms of Perceptual Learning

描述（由申请人提供）：大脑如何适应新的环境，同时保护其架构免受不受不良信息持续轰炸的影响？本提案的目标是澄清低级感觉系统如何解决这种稳定性-可塑性困境。直到最近，人们还认为低级感觉系统是刚性的，因此对环境变化具有抵抗力，只有持续关注原始特征，这些系统才能得到修改。然而，最近的一系列研究表明，低级视觉系统的可塑性比以前认为的要大得多。在没有注意到该特征的情况下，在亚阈值、与任务无关的特征上的性能改善发生（Watanabe等人，2001，2002; Seitz & Watanabe，2003）。如果注意力不能开启学习，那么是什么保护感觉系统不受不良改变的影响呢？为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一系列的心理物理实验，以调查可塑性是如何门控在低层次的感觉系统。这些实验将探索早期感觉系统中学习和可塑性的不同方面;学习的可关联性，学习所需的处理深度，学习的动力学，学习的干扰，以及相同或不同途径或感觉方式的学习。这些门控学习机制的成功澄清将大大有助于我们理解如何解决稳定性和可塑性的困境，在低层次的视觉阶段。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): How can the brain adapt to new environments while protecting its architecture from modification from the continual bombardment of undesirable information? The goal of the present proposal is to clarify how low-level sensory systems solve this stability-plasticity dilemma. Until recently, it was thought that low-level sensory systems were rigid and, therefore, resistant to environmental changes, and that only with persistent and focused attention on primitive features can these systems be modified. However, recently a series of studies have indicated that the low-level visual system is significantly more plastic than previously thought. Performance improvement on a sub-threshold, task-irrelevant feature occurred without attention to that feature (Watanabe et al, 2001,2002; Seitz & Watanabe, 2003). If attention does not gate learning, then what protects the sensory systems from undesirable modification? To address this question, we propose a series of psychophysical experiments to investigate how plasticity is gated in low-level sensory systems. These experiments will explore different aspects of learning and plasticity in the early sensory systems; the associability of learning, depth of processing required for learning, dynamics of learning, interference of learning, and learning across the same or different pathways or sensory modalities. Successful clarification of these gating mechanisms for learning will greatly contribute to our understanding of how the stability-plasticity dilemma is solved in low-level visual stages.