Seeing What is Not There Shows the Costs of Perceptual Learning

Overview

Journal Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Specialty Science

Date 2005 Jun 16

PMID 15956204

Citations 19

Authors

Aaron R Seitz

Jose E Nanez

Steven R Holloway

Shinichi Koyama

Takeo Watanabe

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Perceptual learning is an improvement in one's sensory abilities after training and is thought to help us to better adapt to the sensory environment. Here, we show that perceptual learning also can lead to misperceptions, such that subjects actually perceive stimuli when none are physically presented. After learning, subjects not only showed enhanced performance when tested with the motion direction of the trained stimulus but also often reported seeing dots moving in the trained direction when no stimulus was displayed. We further show that these misperceptions are not attributable to a response bias. These results show that there are costs as well as benefits to perceptual learning and that performance enhancements for a specific feature also can be accompanied by misperceptions of the visual environment.

Citing Articles

Asymmetric stimulus representations bias visual perceptual learning.

Laamerad P, Awada A, Pack C, Bakhtiari S J Vis. 2024; 24(1):10.

PMID: 38285454 PMC: 10829801. DOI: 10.1167/jov.24.1.10.

Comparing random dot motion in MATLAB vs. Inquisit Millisecond.

Yaghoubi K, Kabbara S, Arian S, Kobaissi H, Peters M, Seitz A Front Psychol. 2022; 13:1035518.

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Change-detection training and its effects on visual processing skills.

Truong J, Buschkuehl M, Smith-Peirce R, Carrillo A, Seitz A, Jaeggi S Sci Rep. 2022; 12(1):12646.

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Expectations developed over multiple timescales facilitate visual search performance.

Gekas N, Seitz A, Series P J Vis. 2015; 15(9):10.

PMID: 26200891 PMC: 4511121. DOI: 10.1167/15.9.10.

Visual perceptual learning by operant conditioning training follows rules of contingency.

Kim D, Seitz A, Watanabe T Vis cogn. 2015; 23(1-2):147-160.

PMID: 26028984 PMC: 4443931. DOI: 10.1080/13506285.2015.1015663.

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