Du Yangyang, Kou Hui, Liu Huijie, Bi Taiyong
School of Management, Zunyi Medical University, Zunyi, China.
School of Medical Information Engineering, Zunyi Medical University, Zunyi, China.
Front Neurosci. 2025 Apr 28;19:1578862. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1578862. eCollection 2025.
Perceptual learning of complex stimulus (such as faces or houses) are shown to be specific to the stimulus, indicating the plasticity of the human high-level visual cortex. However, limited understanding exists regarding the plasticity of the representation of complex stimuli in visual working memory (VWM) and its specificity.
To address this question, we adopted a delayed match-to-sample task to train the working memory for faces and houses. Subjects were trained for 6 days with neutral faces, happy faces, sad faces, and houses in Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively.
The results revealed that training significantly increased the sensitivity (d') to discriminate the visual representations in VWM in all four experiments. Furthermore, the learning effects of neutral faces were transferable to emotional faces and vice versa. However, the learning effects of emotional faces exhibited limited transfer to untrained emotional faces. More importantly, the transfer of learning effects between faces and houses was asymmetrical, i.e., only the learning effects of faces could transfer to houses, whereas the reverse was not true.
These results highlight distinct cognitive processes underlying the training effects for different stimulus categories and provide valuable insights into the mechanisms of VWM improvement.
复杂刺激（如面孔或房屋）的知觉学习表现出对刺激的特异性，这表明人类高级视觉皮层具有可塑性。然而，对于复杂刺激在视觉工作记忆（VWM）中的表征可塑性及其特异性，人们的了解有限。
为了解决这个问题，我们采用延迟样本匹配任务来训练面孔和房屋的工作记忆。在实验1、2、3和4中，分别使用中性面孔、开心面孔、悲伤面孔和房屋对受试者进行了6天的训练。
结果显示，在所有四个实验中，训练均显著提高了辨别VWM中视觉表征的敏感度（d'）。此外，中性面孔的学习效果可转移至情绪面孔，反之亦然。然而，情绪面孔的学习效果向未训练的情绪面孔的转移有限。更重要的是，面孔和房屋之间学习效果的转移是不对称的，即只有面孔的学习效果可以转移到房屋，反之则不然。
这些结果突出了不同刺激类别的训练效果背后不同的认知过程，并为VWM改善机制提供了有价值的见解。
