School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China; PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Curr Biol. 2023 Jun 19;33(12):2407-2416.e4. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.04.070. Epub 2023 May 23.
The belief that learning can be modulated by social context is mainly supported by high-level value-based learning studies. However, whether social context can even modulate low-level learning such as visual perceptual learning (VPL) is still unknown. Unlike traditional VPL studies in which participants were trained singly, here, we developed a novel dyadic VPL paradigm in which paired participants were trained with the same orientation discrimination task and could monitor each other's performance. We found that the social context (i.e., dyadic training) led to a greater behavioral performance improvement and a faster learning rate compared with the single training. Interestingly, the facilitating effects could be modulated by the performance difference between paired participants. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results showed that, compared with the single training, social cognition areas including bilateral parietal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex displayed a different activity pattern and enhanced functional connectivities to early visual cortex (EVC) during the dyadic training. Furthermore, the dyadic training resulted in more refined orientation representation in primary visual cortex (V1), which was closely associated with the greater behavioral performance improvement. Taken together, we demonstrate that the social context, learning with a partner, can remarkably augment the plasticity of low-level visual information process by means of reshaping the neural activities in EVC and social cognition areas, as well as their functional interplays.
认为学习可以通过社会环境进行调节的观点主要得到了高级基于价值的学习研究的支持。然而，社会环境是否可以调节低层次的学习，如视觉感知学习（VPL），仍然未知。与传统的 VPL 研究不同，在传统的 VPL 研究中，参与者是单独接受训练的，在这里，我们开发了一种新的对偶 VPL 范式，在这种范式中，配对的参与者接受相同的方向辨别任务训练，并可以监测彼此的表现。我们发现，与单独训练相比，社会环境（即对偶训练）导致了更大的行为表现改善和更快的学习速度。有趣的是，促进作用可以通过配对参与者之间的表现差异来调节。功能磁共振成像（fMRI）结果表明，与单独训练相比，社会认知区域，包括双侧顶叶皮层和背外侧前额叶皮层，在对偶训练期间显示出不同的活动模式，并增强了与早期视觉皮层（EVC）的功能连接。此外，对偶训练导致初级视觉皮层（V1）中方向表示更加精细，这与更大的行为表现改善密切相关。综上所述，我们证明了社会环境，与伙伴一起学习，可以通过重塑 EVC 和社会认知区域的神经活动以及它们的功能相互作用，显著增强低水平视觉信息处理的可塑性。
