Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences, Brown University, 190 Thayer Street, Providence, RI, 02912, USA.
Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology, University of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 11, 20146, Hamburg, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2019 Feb 7;9(1):1666. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-38586-8.
The brain has evolved to extract behaviourally meaningful information from the environment. For example, it has been shown that visual perceptual learning (VPL) can occur for task-irrelevant stimulus features when those features are consistently paired with internal or external reinforcement signals. It is, however, unclear whether or not task-irrelevant VPL is influenced by stimulus features that are unrelated to reinforcement in a given sensory context. To address this question, we exposed participants to task-irrelevant and subliminal coherent motion stimuli in the background while they performed a central character identification task. A specific motion direction was consistently paired with the task-targets, while two other directions occurred only with distractors and, thus, were unrelated to reinforcement. We found that the magnitude of VPL of the target-paired direction was significantly greater when the distractor-paired directions were close to the target-paired direction, compared to when they were farther. Thus, even very weak signals that are both subliminal and unrelated to reinforcement are processed and exert an influence on VPL. This finding suggests that the outcome of VPL depends on the sensory context in which learning takes place and calls for a refinement of VPL theories to incorporate exposure-based influences on learning.
大脑已经进化到能够从环境中提取具有行为意义的信息。例如，已经表明，当视觉感知学习 (VPL) 与内部或外部强化信号一致时，与任务无关的刺激特征也可以发生变化。然而，目前尚不清楚与给定感觉环境中的强化无关的刺激特征是否会影响与任务无关的 VPL。为了解决这个问题，我们在参与者执行中央字符识别任务时，在背景中呈现与任务无关和潜意识的连贯运动刺激。特定的运动方向与任务目标一致，而另外两个方向仅与干扰物一起出现，因此与强化无关。我们发现，当与目标配对的方向相匹配的干扰物配对的方向接近目标配对的方向时，VPL 的幅度明显更大，而当它们更远时则相反。因此，即使是非常微弱的、潜意识的且与强化无关的信号也会被处理，并对 VPL 产生影响。这一发现表明，VPL 的结果取决于学习发生的感觉环境，并呼吁对 VPL 理论进行细化，以纳入基于暴露的学习影响。
