[CCoE Notice] CNECS - Periopsia Joint Seminar: Cong Yu, Friday, November 8 12noon

[Ogmen, Haluk]

CENTER for NEURO-ENGINEERING and COGNITIVE SCIENCE
COLLEGE of OPTOMETRY, PERIOPSIA
JOINT SEMINAR
Visual perceptual learning and its brain mechanisms:
A new perspective
Cong Yu
Department of Psychology and Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences
Peking University, Beijing, China

Date: Friday, November 8, 2013
Time: 12noon-1PM
Location: Health and Biomedical Sciences Building (HBSB), Room 203E
 Visual perceptual learning is regarded as a powerful tool to understand brain plasticity at the behavioral level. Learning is known to be specific to the trained retinal location and orientation, which places important constraints on all perceptual learning theories, many of which assume that perceptual learning occurs in the early visual areas that are retinotopic and orientation selective. However, we created new experimental paradigms to demonstrate that location and orientation specificities can be eliminated from perceptual learning. In a “double training” paradigm, location specific learning can transfer completely to a new retinal location following additional training at the new location with an irrelevant task. Similarly, in a training-plus-exposure (TPE) paradigm, orientation-specific learning in both normal and amblyopic vision can transfer completely to an orthogonal orientation if an observer is also passively exposed to the orthogonal orientation through an irrelevant task. These results suggest that perceptual learning is more likely a high-level process that occurs beyond the retinotopic and orientation selective visual cortex. What is being actually learned in perceptual learning? I will present evidence that orientation perceptual learning may be orientation “concept” learning, in that the brain may learn a highly abstract “concept” of what orientation is. On the other hand, why high-level perceptual learning shows specificity in the first place? I will speculate that learning specificity may result from high-level learning not being able to functionally connect to the visual inputs representing the new locations or orientations, probably because of attention related suppression of untrained visual inputs. It is the double training and TPE paradigms that reactivate untrained inputs to establish functional connections and enable learning transfer.

For information, contact: Haluk Ogmen, ogmen at uh.edu<mailto:ogmen at uh.edu>

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