Perceptual Learning: Effects and Mechanisms

各个领域的专家（如专业品酒师、经验丰富的放射技师）都有能力做出非专家无法做到的精细区分。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），但也仅仅是适当接触要区分的物品的结果/比较两种葡萄酒或两幅图像的机会在这里似乎很重要。这种感知学习效应可以在实验室中得到证明——幼稚的个体，呈现在复杂的视觉显示面前，这些视觉显示最初是无法区分的，当以一种允许不同显示之间进行比较的方式排列时，在反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感知学习的两个基本问题。首先，对刺激的体验使它被不同地感知。但感知到的刺激变化的本质是什么？我们计划做一些实验来验证这样一种观点，即对于有经验的观察者来说，刺激的鲜明特征变得突出并引起注意，而刺激显示的其他方面则失去了效力。其次，我们想知道导致这种学习形式的机制。什么学习过程负责改变刺激的感知有效性？先前的研究表明，在动物学习研究中获得的感知学习效应可以通过非常简单的学习过程（特别是那些被称为习惯化和联想形成的过程）的操作产生。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.