Bottom-up and top-down influences at untrained conditions determine perceptual learning specificity and transfer
Abstract
Perceptual learning is often orientation and location specific, which may indicate neuronal plasticity in early visual areas. However, learning specificity diminishes with additional exposure of the transfer orientation or location via irrelevant tasks, suggesting that the specificity is related to untrained conditions, likely because neurons representing untrained conditions are neither bottom-up stimulated nor top-down attended during training. To demonstrate these top-down and bottom-up contributions, we applied a 'continuous flash suppression' technique to suppress the exposure stimulus into sub-consciousness, and with additional manipulations to achieve pure bottom-up stimulation or top-down attention with the transfer condition. We found that either bottom-up or top-down influences enabled significant transfer of orientation and Vernier discrimination learning. These results suggest that learning specificity may result from under-activations of untrained visual neurons due to insufficient bottom-up stimulation and/or top-down attention during training. High-level perceptual learning thus may not functionally connect to these neurons for learning transfer.
Article and author information
Author details
Ethics
Human subjects: Informed consent, and consent to publish was obtained from each observer before testing. This study was approved by the Peking University Institution Review Board.
Copyright
© 2016, Xiong et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,107
- views
-
- 355
- downloads
-
- 27
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
A dysfunctional signaling pathway in the hippocampus has been linked to chronic pain-related memory impairment in mice.