Plasticity of Spatial Interactions in Early Vision

When a person is asked to perform a visual (or any other sensory) discrimination task it is often the case that he or she improves with practice, even on very sim­ ple tasks. This improvement occurs without any reinforcement and does not seem to involve conscious effort, but rather it see ms to be controlled by some inherent subconscious process. During the last decade perceptual learning was shown to be involved in a variety of visual tasks: Stereoscopic vision,25•31 gratings detection,5•8 hyper-acuity,23•30 phase discrimination,8 motion detection,2 texture discrimination (Karni and Sagi, this volume), 1•13•14 search,38 and pattern discrimination. 24 Some of these studies showed specificity of learning for location in the visual field2·8·14•24•25,30 (what was learned at one retinal location could not be used when stimulus was pre­ sented at another location), for orientation, 1•2•8•14•20•30•31 spatial frequency, 8 and direction of motion. 2 Though in most of these experiments learning was found to transfer across eyes (what was learned with one eye only could be used with the other eye), some studies showed only partial transfer2 or absence of transfer,14 thus supporting a low-level anatomical site for the learning to take place. In some cases learning was found to persist for a few weeks,2•8 or even for years15 without

[1]  O Braddick,et al.  Orientation-Specific Learning in Stereopsis , 1973, Perception.

[2]  E. Gibson,et al.  Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development , 1973 .

[3]  K. D. Valois.  Spatial frequency adaptation can enhance contrast sensitivity , 1977, Vision Research.

[4]  S. McKee,et al.  Improvement in vernier acuity with practice , 1978, Perception & psychophysics.

[5]  S. Zeki.  Functional specialisation in the visual cortex of the rhesus monkey , 1978, Nature.

[6]  A. Fiorentini,et al.  Learning in grating waveform discrimination: Specificity for orientation and spatial frequency , 1981, Vision Research.

[7]  M. Mayer.  Practice improves adults' sensitivity to diagonals , 1983, Vision Research.

[8]  R. Sekuler,et al.  Direction-specific improvement in motion discrimination , 1987, Vision Research.

[9]  R. Browse,et al.  Micropattern properties and presentation conditions influencing visual texture discrimination , 1987, Perception & psychophysics.

[10]  S B Steinman,et al.  Serial and Parallel Search in Pattern Vision? , 1987, Perception.

[11]  Practice effects in backward masking. , 1988, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[12]  Susan L. Franzel,et al.  Binocularity and visual search , 1988, Perception & psychophysics.

[13]  J. O'Regan,et al.  Some results on translation invariance in the human visual system. , 1990, Spatial vision.

[14]  D. Sagi,et al.  Vision outside the focus of attention , 1990, Perception & psychophysics.

[15]  B. S. Rubenstein,et al.  Spatial variability as a limiting factor in texture-discrimination tasks: implications for performance asymmetries. , 1990, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics and image science.

[16]  D Sagi,et al.  Where practice makes perfect in texture discrimination: evidence for primary visual cortex plasticity. , 1991, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[17]  G. Recanzone,et al.  Progressive improvement in discriminative abilities in adult owl monkeys performing a tactile frequency discrimination task. , 1992, Journal of neurophysiology.

[18]  G. Recanzone,et al.  Changes in the distributed temporal response properties of SI cortical neurons reflect improvements in performance on a temporally based tactile discrimination task. , 1992, Journal of neurophysiology.

[19]  J. Kaas,et al.  Rapid reorganization of cortical maps in adult cats following restricted deafferentation in retina , 1992, Vision Research.

[20]  A J O'Toole,et al.  Learning to See Random-Dot Stereograms , 1992, Perception.

[21]  Y. Frégnac,et al.  Cellular analogs of visual cortical epigenesis. I. Plasticity of orientation selectivity , 1992, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[22]  T. Wiesel,et al.  Receptive field dynamics in adult primary visual cortex , 1992, Nature.

[23]  M. Pettet,et al.  Dynamic changes in receptive-field size in cat primary visual cortex. , 1992, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[24]  H. Pashler,et al.  Improvement in line orientation discrimination is retinally local but dependent on cognitive set , 1992, Perception & psychophysics.

[25]  Y. Frégnac,et al.  Cellular analogs of visual cortical epigenesis. II. Plasticity of binocular integration , 1992, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[26]  T Poggio,et al.  Fast perceptual learning in visual hyperacuity. , 1991, Science.

[27]  N. Weinberger,et al.  Long-term retention of learning-induced receptive-field plasticity in the auditory cortex. , 1993, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[28]  J. Edeline,et al.  Receptive field plasticity in the auditory cortex during frequency discrimination training: selective retuning independent of task difficulty. , 1993, Behavioral neuroscience.

[29]  U. Polat,et al.  Lateral interactions between spatial channels: Suppression and facilitation revealed by lateral masking experiments , 1993, Vision Research.

[30]  S. Edelman,et al.  Long-term learning in vernier acuity: Effects of stimulus orientation, range and of feedback , 1993, Vision Research.

[31]  Shimon Edelman,et al.  Models of Perceptual Learning in Vernier Hyperacuity , 1993, Neural Computation.

[32]  N. Weinberger.  Learning-induced changes of auditory receptive fields , 1993, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[33]  M. Merzenich,et al.  Plasticity in the frequency representation of primary auditory cortex following discrimination training in adult owl monkeys , 1993, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[34]  S. Hochstein,et al.  Attentional control of early perceptual learning. , 1993, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[35]  I Kovács,et al.  A closed curve is much more than an incomplete one: effect of closure in figure-ground segmentation. , 1993, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[36]  M. Merzenich,et al.  Cortical plasticity and memory , 1993, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[37]  A. Karni,et al.  The time course of learning a visual skill , 1993, Nature.

[38]  M M Merzenich,et al.  Neural Mechanisms Underlying Temporal Integration, Segmentation, and Input Sequence Representation: Some Implications for the Origin of Learning Disabilities a , 1993, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[39]  Charles D. Gilbert,et al.  Rapid dynamic changes in adult cerebral cortex , 1993, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[40]  U Polat,et al.  Spatial interactions in human vision: from near to far via experience-dependent cascades of connections. , 1994, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[41]  U. Polat,et al.  The architecture of perceptual spatial interactions , 1994, Vision Research.

[42]  A. Karni,et al.  Dependence on REM sleep of overnight improvement of a perceptual skill. , 1994, Science.

[43]  D. Sagi,et al.  Isolating Excitatory and Inhibitory Nonlinear Spatial Interactions Involved in Contrast Detection * * Part of this paper was presented at the 17th ECVP conference, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (September 1994). , 1996, Vision Research.