School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Haidian, Beijing, 100871, China.
Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, China.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2022 Nov;84(8):2540-2551. doi: 10.3758/s13414-022-02520-4. Epub 2022 Jun 8.
Perceptual training of multiple tasks suffers from interference between the trained tasks. Here, we conducted five psychophysical experiments with separate groups of participants to investigate the possibility of preventing the interference in short-term perceptual training. We trained the participants to detect two orientations of Gabor stimuli in two adjacent days at the same retinal location and examined the interference of training effects between the two orientations. The results showed significant retroactive interference from the second orientation to the first orientation (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2). Introducing a 6-h interval between the pre-test and training of the second orientation did not eliminate the interference effect, excluding the interpretation of disrupted reconsolidation as the pre-test of the second orientation may reactivate and destabilize the representation of the first orientation (Experiment 3). Finally, the training of the two orientations was accompanied by fixations in two colors, each serving as a contextual cue for one orientation. The results showed that the retroactive interference was not evident if the participants passively perceived contextual cues during the training and test sessions (Experiment 4). Importantly, this facilitation effect could be observed if the contextual cues appeared only during the training, demonstrating the robustness of the effect (Experiment 5). Our findings suggest that the retroactive interference effect in short-term perceptual training of orientation detection tasks was likely the result of higher-level factors such as shared contextual cues embedded in the tasks. The efficiency of multiple perceptual trainings could be facilitated by associating the trained tasks with different contextual cues.
多项任务的感知训练会受到已训练任务之间的干扰。在这里，我们通过五个独立的实验小组进行了五项心理物理实验，以研究防止短期感知训练中干扰的可能性。我们在两天内于同一视网膜位置训练参与者检测两个方向的 Gabor 刺激，并检查了两个方向之间的训练效果的干扰。结果表明，第二个方向对第一个方向的后效干扰非常显著（实验 1 和实验 2）。在第二个方向的预测试和训练之间引入 6 小时的间隔并没有消除干扰效应，排除了重新巩固中断的解释，因为第二个方向的预测试可能会重新激活并破坏第一个方向的表示（实验 3）。最后，两个方向的训练伴随着两种颜色的注视点，每种颜色作为一个方向的上下文线索。结果表明，如果参与者在训练和测试过程中被动感知上下文线索，则后效干扰不明显（实验 4）。重要的是，如果上下文线索仅在训练期间出现，则可以观察到这种促进效应，证明了该效应的稳健性（实验 5）。我们的研究结果表明，在检测任务的短期感知训练中，后效干扰效应可能是任务中嵌入的共享上下文线索等高级因素的结果。通过将训练任务与不同的上下文线索相关联，可以提高多项感知训练的效率。
