Orientation perceptual learning may be orientation concept learning C Yu |
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Department of Psychology, Peking University, China
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| Where learning occurs in the brain and what is being learned are central to the understanding of perceptual learning. Previously we have used new double training and training-plus-exposure (TPE) techniques to enable perceptual learning of orientation discrimination to transfer completely to untrained retinal locations and orientations (Zhang et al., VisRes & JNeurosci, 2010a,b), indicating that orientation learning is a high-level process occurring beyond retinotopic and orientation-selective visual areas. Recently Wu Li at Beijing Normal University and I also demonstrated complete mutual transfer of perceptual learning between explicit and implicit orientation signals. Specifically, learning of discriminating implicit symmetry axis orientation, likely encoded by later visual areas, transferred completely to explicit grating orientation encoded by V1 neurons. Meanwhile, explicit grating orientation learning transferred only partially to implicit symmetry axis orientation, but the transfer became complete with additional exposure of the symmetric patterns in an irrelevant task (TPE training). The mutual complete learning transfer suggests that orientation learning is a highly abstract process that is unspecific to not only the trained retinal location and orientation, but also the stimulus physical properties and underlying neural decoders. We argue that the concept of orientation is being learned in highly abstract orientation perceptual learning. |
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