Graduate Center for Vision Research, State University of New York College of Optometry, New York, New York, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2010 Oct 8;5(10):e13295. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013295.
The visual system can learn to use information in new ways to construct appearance. Thus, signals such as the location or translation direction of an ambiguously rotating wire frame cube, which are normally uninformative, can be learned as cues to determine the rotation direction. This perceptual learning occurs when the formerly uninformative signal is statistically associated with long-trusted visual cues (such as binocular disparity) that disambiguate appearance during training. In previous demonstrations, the newly learned cue was intrinsic to the perceived object, in that the signal was conveyed by the same image elements as the object itself. Here we used extrinsic new signals and observed no learning. We correlated three new signals with long-trusted cues in the rotating cube paradigm: one crossmodal (an auditory signal) and two within modality (visual). Cue recruitment did not occur in any of these conditions, either in single sessions or in ten sessions across as many days. These results suggest that the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction is important for the perceptual system in determining whether it can learn and use new information from the environment to construct appearance. Extrinsic cues do have perceptual effects (e.g. the "bounce-pass" illusion and McGurk effect), so we speculate that extrinsic signals must be recruited for perception, but only if certain conditions are met. These conditions might specify the age of the observer, the strength of the long-trusted cues, or the amount of exposure to the correlation.
视觉系统可以学习以新的方式利用信息来构建外观。因此，原本不提供信息的信号，如旋转线框立方体的位置或平移方向，可以被学习为确定旋转方向的线索。这种感知学习发生在原本不提供信息的信号与长期信任的视觉线索（如双眼视差）在训练期间解外观歧义相关联时。在之前的演示中，新学到的线索是被感知对象固有的，因为信号是由与对象本身相同的图像元素传递的。在这里，我们使用了外在的新信号，并且没有观察到学习。我们在旋转立方体范式中，将三个新信号与长期信任的线索相关联：一个跨模态（听觉信号）和两个模态内（视觉）信号。在这些条件下，无论是在单个会话中还是在 10 个跨越多个天数的会话中，都没有出现线索招募。这些结果表明，内在/外在的区别对于感知系统很重要，决定它是否能够学习和利用环境中的新信息来构建外观。外在线索确实具有感知效应（例如“反弹传球”错觉和麦格克效应），因此我们推测外在信号必须被招募用于感知，但只有在满足某些条件时才会这样。这些条件可能指定观察者的年龄、长期信任线索的强度或对相关性的暴露程度。
