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Perceptual Learning (perceptual + learning)
Selected AbstractsProlonged maturation of auditory perception and learning in gerbilsDEVELOPMENTAL NEUROBIOLOGY, Issue 9 2010Emma C. Sarro Abstract In humans, auditory perception reaches maturity over a broad age range, extending through adolescence. Despite this slow maturation, children are considered to be outstanding learners, suggesting that immature perceptual skills might actually be advantageous to improvement on an acoustic task as a result of training (perceptual learning). Previous non-human studies have not employed an identical task when comparing perceptual performance of young and mature subjects, making it difficult to assess learning. Here, we used an identical procedure on juvenile and adult gerbils to examine the perception of amplitude modulation (AM), a stimulus feature that is an important component of most natural sounds. On average, Adult animals could detect smaller fluctuations in amplitude (i.e., smaller modulation depths) than Juveniles, indicating immature perceptual skills in Juveniles. However, the population variance was much greater for Juveniles, a few animals displaying adult-like AM detection. To determine whether immature perceptual skills facilitated learning, we compared naïve performance on the AM detection task with the amount of improvement following additional training. The amount of improvement in Adults correlated with naïve performance: those with the poorest naïve performance improved the most. In contrast, the naïve performance of Juveniles did not predict the amount of learning. Those Juveniles with immature AM detection thresholds did not display greater learning than Adults. Furthermore, for several of the Juveniles with adult-like thresholds, AM detection deteriorated with repeated testing. Thus, immature perceptual skills in young animals were not associated with greater learning. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Develop Neurobiol 70: 636,648, 2010 [source] Effects of redundant and nonredundant bimodal sensory stimulation on heart rate in bobwhite quail embryosDEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOBIOLOGY, Issue 4 2003Greg D. Reynolds Abstract Research with both animal embryos and human infants has provided evidence that information presented redundantly and in temporal synchrony across sensory modalities (intersensory redundancy) can guide selective attention, perceptual learning, and memory during early development. How this facilitation is achieved remains relatively unexamined. This study examined the effects of redundant versus nonredundant bimodal stimulation on a measure of physiological arousal (heart rate) in bobwhite quail embryos. Results show that quail embryos exposed to concurrent but nonredundant auditory and visual stimulation during the late stages of incubation exhibit significantly elevated heart rates following stimulus exposure and during stimulus reexposure when compared to embryos exposed to redundant and synchronous audiovisual stimulation, unimodal auditory stimulation, or no supplemental prenatal sensory stimulation. These findings indicate a functional distinction between redundant and nonredundant bimodal stimulation during early development and suggest that nonredundant bimodal stimulation during the prenatal period can raise arousal levels, thereby potentially interfering with the attentional capacities and perceptual learning of bobwhite quail. In contrast, intersensory redundancy appears to foster arousal levels that facilitate selective attention and perceptual learning during prenatal development. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 43: 304,310, 2003. [source] Intersensory redundancy facilitates discrimination of tempo in 3-month-old infantsDEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOBIOLOGY, Issue 4 2002Lorraine E. Bahrick Abstract L. Bahrick and R. Lickliter (2000) proposed an intersensory redundancy hypothesis that states that information presented redundantly and in temporal synchrony across two or more sensory modalities selectively recruits infant attention and facilitates perceptual learning more effectively than does the same information presented unimodally. In support of this view, they found that 5-month-old infants were able to differentiate between two complex rhythms when they were presented bimodally, but not unimodally. The present study extended our test of the intersensory redundancy hypothesis to younger infants and to a different amodal property. Three-month-olds' sensitivity to the amodal property of tempo was investigated. Results replicated and extended those of Bahrick and Lickliter, demonstrating that infants could discriminate a change in tempo following bimodal, but not unimodal, habituation. It appears that when infants are first learning to differentiate an amodal stimulus property, discrimination is facilitated by intersensory redundancy and attenuated under conditions of unimodal stimulation. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 41: 352,363, 2002. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/dev.10049 [source] Learning While Babbling: Prelinguistic Object-Directed Vocalizations Indicate a Readiness to LearnINFANCY, Issue 4 2010Michael H. Goldstein Two studies illustrate the functional significance of a new category of prelinguistic vocalizing,object-directed vocalizations (ODVs),and show that these sounds are connected to learning about words and objects. Experiment 1 tested 12-month-old infants' perceptual learning of objects that elicited ODVs. Fourteen infants' vocalizations were recorded as they explored novel objects. Infants learned visual features of objects that elicited the most ODVs but not of objects that elicited the fewest vocalizations. Experiment 2 assessed the role of ODVs in learning word,object associations. Forty infants aged 11.5 months played with a novel object and received a label either contingently on an ODV or on a look alone. Only infants who received labels in response to an ODV learned the association. Taken together, the findings suggest that infants' ODVs signal a state of attention that facilitates learning. [source] Accurate motion-produced distance and direction under systematically distorted perceptionJAPANESE PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2005NAOFUMI FUJITA Abstract:, We report the visually directed actions of soccer players. After perceiving the location of a target on their left side at the starting point and traveling toward the ball without seeing the target, the players could kick the ball accurately (Experiment 2). In contrast, if they were verbally asked the direction of the target in a similar situation, the perceived direction was systematically distorted (Experiment 3). Our major concern in explaining the distorted perception was whether the egocentric distance before locomotion was perceived accurately or not, and whether the updating of the target location during locomotion was accurate or not. Combining these two possibilities, there should be four hypotheses, each of which assumes either: (1) accurate egocentric distance and accurate updating, (2) inaccurate egocentric distance and accurate updating, (3) accurate egocentric distance and inaccurate updating, or (4) inaccurate egocentric distance and inaccurate updating. Based on these hypotheses, we conducted four simulations, which revealed that the combination of the perception of the accurate egocentric distance and the distorted updating that substituted the constant function for the sine function produced not only a good r2, but also three kinds of interactions obtained in Experiment 3. Why did the players, based on their distorted perception, perform accurately? We would like to suggest that through perceptual learning they might acquire a perceptual-motor relation as the inverse function of the physical-perceptual relation. [source] Input and SLA: Adults' Sensitivity to Different Sorts of Cues to French GenderLANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue S1 2005Susanne E. Carroll All second language (L2) learning theories presuppose that learners learn the target language from the speech signal (or written material, when learners are reading), so an understanding of learners' ability to detect and represent novel patterns in linguistic stimuli will constitute a major building block in an adequate theory of second language acquisition (SLA) input. Pattern detection, a mainstay of current connectionist modeling of language learning, presupposes a sensitivity to particular properties of the signal. Learning abstract grammatical knowledge from the signal presupposes, as well, the capacity to map phonetic properties of the signal onto properties of another type (segments and syllables, morpheme categories, and so on). Thus, even seemingly "simple" grammatical phenomena may embody complex structural knowledge and be instantiated by a plethora of diverse cues. Moreover, cues have no a priori status; a phenomenon of a given sort takes on a value as a cue when acquisition of the grammatical system reveals it to be useful. My study deals with initial sensitivity to cues to gender attribution in French. Andersen (1984) asked: "What's gender good for anyway?" One answer comes from a number of studies, done mostly in the last 20 years, of gender processing by both monolingual and bilingual speakers (among many others, Bates, Devescovi, Hernandez, & Pizzamiglio, 1996; Bates & Liu, 1997; Friederici & Jacobsen, 1990; Grosjean, Dommergues, Cornu, Guillemon, & Besson, 1994; Guillemon & Grosjean, 2001; Taft & Meunier, 1998). These studies provide evidence that in monolinguals and early (but not late) L2 learners, prenominal morphosyntactic exponents of gender prime noun activation and speed up noun recognition. Over the same period, a growing number of studies detailing the course of L2 gender acquisition for a variety of different target languages and learner types (e.g., Bartning, 2000; Chini, 1995; Dewaele & Véronique, 2000; Granfeldt, 2003; Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004) have provided support for the hypothesis that developmental paths differ for early and later learners of gender. Yet despite its obvious importance to SLA theorizing, few studies have dealt directly with adult learners' ability to detect and analyze potential cues to gender at the initial stage of exposure to the L2 (and this despite considerable discussion in recent years of the nature of the "initial state" of L2 learning). The study reported on in this article, which was actually conducted in the late 1980s, was an attempt to shed some light on what the beginning learner can do with the gender attribution problem. This study was, at that time, and is even now, an anomaly; most research dealing with "input" provided descriptions of what people say to learners, not what learners can perceive and represent. Indeed, most studies that shed light on the initial analytical capacities of absolute beginners were concerned with "perceptual" learning, that is, with the acquisition of phonetic or phonological distinctions (e.g., Broselow, Hurtig, & Ringen's [1987] study of tone learning or various studies on the perception of the /r/ vs. /l/ phonemes in American English by Japanese speakers). In this update, it is therefore worth mentioning Rast's (2003) dissertation and Rast and Dommergues (2003), which is based on it, which examined the results of the first 8 hr of instructed learning of Polish by francophone adults. My study asked if anglophone adults, with little or no prior exposure to French, given auditory stimuli, were equally sensitive to phonological, morphosyntactic, or semantic cues to French gender classes. The issue of what learners can detect in the signal and encode is an empirical one. I presented 88 adult English speakers with highly patterned data in list form, namely, auditory sequences of [Det + N]French + translation equivalentEnglish forms. The patterns, all true generalizations, were drawn from linguistic descriptions of French. These cues are believed by grammarians of the language to be "psychologically real" to native speakers. I then measured in 3 different ways what my participants had acquired. Given the extreme limitations on the input (no visual supports to identify referents of names), the participants performed pretty well. Moreover, they proved to be highly sensitive to "natural" semantic and morphological patterns and could generalize accurately from learned instances to novel exemplars. These patterns, however, are not directly instantiated in the speech signal; they are abstractions imposed on the stimuli by human linguistic cognition. Moreover, although it would be inaccurate to describe the learning patterns as "transfer"(because English nouns have no gender feature), prior knowledge seemed to be implicated in the results. Above all, these Anglophones appear to perceive the gender learning problem as a semantic one and to make use of "top-down" information in solving it. It follows that the pattern detection that they can do when listening to speech is clearly biased by what they already know. These results, therefore, provide support for hypotheses that the initial state is to be defined in terms of the transfer of first language (L1) grammatical knowledge and/or the transfer of L1-based processing procedures. [source] Characterizing perceptual learning with external noiseCOGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 2 2004Jason M. Gold Abstract Performance in perceptual tasks often improves with practice. This effect is known as ,perceptual learning,' and it has been the source of a great deal of interest and debate over the course of the last century. Here, we consider the effects of perceptual learning within the context of signal detection theory. According to signal detection theory, the improvements that take place with perceptual learning can be due to increases in internal signal strength or decreases in internal noise. We used a combination of psychophysical techniques (external noise masking and double-pass response consistency) that involve corrupting stimuli with externally added noise to discriminate between the effects of changes in signal and noise as observers learned to identify sets of unfamiliar visual patterns. Although practice reduced thresholds by as much as a factor of 14, internal noise remained virtually fixed throughout training, indicating learning served to predominantly increase the strength of the internal signal. We further examined the specific nature of the changes that took place in signal strength by correlating the externally added noise with observer's decisions across trials (response classification). This technique allowed us to visualize some of the changes that took place in the linear templates used by the observers as learning occurred, as well as test the predictions of a linear template-matching model. Taken together, the results of our experiments offer important new theoretical constraints on models of perceptual learning. [source] | |||||||||||||