Galliussi Jessica, Grzeczkowski Lukasz, Gerbino Walter, Herzog Michael H, Bernardis Paolo
Psychology Unit "G. Kanizsa", Department of Life Sciences, University of Trieste, via Weiss 21, 34128 Trieste, Italy.
Laboratory of Psychophysics, Brain Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Station 19, Plaza 1, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland; Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Leopoldstr. 13, 80802 Munich, Germany.
Vision Res. 2018 Nov;152:118-125. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2017.10.006. Epub 2017 Dec 28.
Perceptual learning can occur for a feature irrelevant to the training task, when it is sub-threshold and outside of the focus of attention (task-irrelevant perceptual learning, TIPL); however, TIPL does not occur when the task-irrelevant feature is supra-threshold. Here, we asked the question whether TIPL occurs when the task-irrelevant feature is sub-threshold but within the focus of spatial attention. We tested participants in three different discrimination tasks performed on a 3-dot stimulus: a horizontal Vernier task and a vertical bisection task (during pre- and post-training sessions), and a luminance task (during training). In Experiment 1 we found that attending to luminance differences within the same stimulus that contains a sub-threshold horizontal offset (an irrelevant feature during training) does not preclude TIPL, as revealed by an improvement in the Vernier task, but not in the bisection task. This conclusion was confirmed in Experiment 2, in which the 3-dot stimulus used during training did not include a horizontal offset.
当与训练任务无关的特征处于阈下且不在注意力焦点之内时（任务无关的知觉学习，TIPL），知觉学习可能会发生；然而，当与任务无关的特征处于阈上时，TIPL不会发生。在此，我们提出一个问题：当与任务无关的特征处于阈下但在空间注意力焦点之内时，TIPL是否会发生。我们让参与者在对三点刺激执行的三种不同辨别任务中进行测试：水平游标任务和垂直平分任务（在训练前和训练后阶段），以及亮度任务（在训练期间）。在实验1中，我们发现，关注包含阈下水平偏移（训练期间的一个无关特征）的同一刺激内的亮度差异并不排除TIPL，如游标任务表现的改善所示，但平分任务则不然。这一结论在实验2中得到了证实，实验2中训练期间使用的三点刺激不包括水平偏移。
