Learning Pop-out Detection: Specificities to Stimulus Characteristics

1996/11/01 by MERAV AHISSAR, Merav Ahissar, Shaul Hochstein +2 · 195 citations
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Artificial intelligence #Biology #Cognitive psychology #Communication #Computer science #Fixation (population genetics) #Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies #Neural dynamics and brain function #Neuroscience #Perception #Perceptual learning #Psychology #Spanish History and Politics #Stimulus (psychology) #Visual cortex #Visual perception #Visual perception and processing mechanisms

paper · doi:10.1016/0042-6989(96)00036-3

published in Vision Research 36(21), 3487-3500 (Elsevier BV)

openalex publication_date 1996/11/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Training induces dramatic improvement in the performance of pop-out detection. In this study, we examined the specificities of this improvement to stimulus characteristics. We found that learning is specific within basic visual dimensions: orientation, size and position. Accordingly, following training with one set of orientations, rotating target and distractors by 30 deg or more substantially hampers performance. Furthermore, rotation of either target or distractors alone greatly increases threshold. Learning is not transferred to reduced-size stimuli. Position specificity near fixation may be finer than 0.7 deg. On the other hand, learning transfers to the untrained eye, to expanded images, to mirror image transformations and to homologous positions across the midline (near fixation). Thus, learning must occur at a processing level which is early enough to maintain fine separability along basic stimulus dimensions, yet sufficiently high to manifest the described generalizations. We suggest that the site of early perceptual learning is one of the cortical areas which receive input from primary visual cortex, V1, and where top-down attentional control is present.

Citations

• Effects of noise letters upon the identification of a target letter in a nonsearch task
• Spatial frequency selectivity of cells in macaque visual cortex
• A feature-integration theory of attention

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