title: Perceptual Learning Generalization from Sequential Perceptual Training as a Change in Learning Rate.
abstract: With practice, humans tend to improve their performance on most tasks. But do such improvements then generalize to new tasks? Although early work documented primarily task-specific learning outcomes in the domain of perceptual learning [1-3], an emerging body of research has shown that significant learning generalization is possible under some training conditions [4-9]. Interestingly, however, research in this vein has focused nearly exclusively on just one possible manifestation of learning generalization, wherein training on one task produces an immediate boost to performance on the new task. For instance, it is this form of generalization that is most frequently referred to when discussing learning "transfer" [10, 11]. Essentially no work in this domain has focused on a second possible manifestation of generalization, wherein the knowledge or skills acquired via training, despite not being directly applicable to the new task, nonetheless allow the new task to be learned more efficiently [12-15]. Here, in both the visual category learning and visual perceptual learning domains, we demonstrate that sequentially training participants on tasks that share a common high-level task structure can produce faster learning of new tasks, even in cases where there is no immediate benefit to performance on the new tasks. We further show that methods commonly employed in the field may fail to detect or else conflate generalization that manifests as increased learning rate with generalization that manifests as immediate boosts to performance. These results thus lay the foundation for the various routes to learning generalization to be more thoroughly explored.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychology, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Alexanderstr. 10, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany.
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Kattner
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706-1611, USA.
authors.forename: Aaron
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cochrane
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706-1611, USA.
authors.forename: Christopher R
authors.initials: CR
authors.lastname: Cox
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706-1611, USA.
authors.forename: Thomas E
authors.initials: TE
authors.lastname: Gorman
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706-1611, USA. Electronic address: cshawn.green@wisc.edu.
authors.forename: C Shawn
authors.initials: CS
authors.lastname: Green
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: generalization; learning to learn; perceptual learning; transfer