Zhen, Leslie
(2025)
Task-Irrelevant Perceptual Learning.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
The brain is tasked with extracting behaviorally meaningful information from perceptual environments containing a wide array of sensory inputs across different modalities, many of which are irrelevant to an attended task. Studies have shown that perceptual learning can occur for task-irrelevant features given appropriate associations between the features and reinforcing events, and that this learning does not require attention towards or perceptual salience of the task-irrelevant feature. Most studies of task-irrelevant perceptual learning have been conducted in unisensory contexts where both the task and irrelevant features occur within the same sensory modality. It is unclear how modality contributes to this learning and the extent to which congruence in the sensory channels between the trained task and irrelevant stimuli interact with learning. To address these questions, this study used a custom and closely analogous auditory adaptation of a frequently used visual training approach. Participants were exposed to visual or auditory task-irrelevant motion stimuli while completing a visual or auditory number identification task. One direction was consistently and temporally paired with the task targets while the other direction was paired with some distractors. Tests of sensitivity administered before and after training revealed that directional learning occurred equally for all training conditions, whether unisensory (i.e., entirely visual or auditory) or cross-modal (i.e., visual task with acoustic task-irrelevant stimuli or vice versa). These findings suggest that the temporal relationship between stimuli and reinforcing events, rather than the sensory modalities of the stimuli and trained task, drive task-irrelevant perceptual learning. This nonspecificity to modality can be exploited to develop interventions where training with stronger sensory systems can engender concomitant enhancements in sensitivity for weaker ones.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
|
| ETD Committee: |
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| Date: |
25 February 2025 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
8 November 2024 |
| Approval Date: |
25 February 2025 |
| Submission Date: |
29 November 2024 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
154 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences > Communication Science and Disorders |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Task-irrelevant perceptual learning, cross-modal learning, reinforcement learning, visual perceptual learning, auditory perceptual learning |
| Date Deposited: |
25 Feb 2025 16:01 |
| Last Modified: |
25 Feb 2025 16:01 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/47112 |
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