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Concept
Perceptual learning
Summary
Perceptual learning is learning better perception skills such as differentiating two musical tones from one another or categorizations of spatial and temporal patterns relevant to real-world expertise. Examples of this may include reading, seeing relations among chess pieces, and knowing whether or not an X-ray image shows a tumor.
Sensory modalities may include visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and taste. Perceptual learning forms important foundations of complex cognitive processes (i.e., language) and interacts with other kinds of learning to produce perceptual expertise. Underlying perceptual learning are changes in the neural circuitry. The ability for perceptual learning is retained throughout life.
It can be fairly easy to confuse category learning and perceptual learning. Category learning is "an assumed fixed, pre-established perceptual representation to describe the objects to be categorized." Category learning is built upon perceptual learning because you are showing a distinction of what the objects are. Perceptual learning is defined as a "change in perception as a product of experience, and has reviewed evidence demonstrating that discrimination between otherwiords that sound similar to their native language. They now can tell the difference whereas in category learning they are trying to separate the two.
Laboratory studies reported many examples of dramatic improvements in sensitivities from appropriately structured perceptual learning tasks. In visual Vernier acuity tasks, observers judge whether one line is displaced above or below a second line. Untrained observers are often already very good with this task, but after training, observers' threshold has been shown to improve as much as 6 fold. Similar improvements have been found for visual motion discrimination and orientation sensitivity.
In visual search tasks, observers are asked to find a target object hidden among distractors or in noise. Studies of perceptual learning with visual search show that experience leads to great gains in sensitivity and speed.
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