题目：Roles of attention and reward in perceptual learning

报告人：Takeo Watanabe; Professor, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences, Brown University

时间：2014年04月22日 星期二 14:30-16:00

地点： Deng Youcai Lecture Hall (Room 101), New Life Sciences Building

邀请人：方方

摘要：Perceptual learning (PL) is defined as long-term performance improvement on a perceptual task as a result of perceptual experience. We first found that PL occurs for task-irrelevant and subthreshold features and that pairing task-irrelevant features with rewards is the key to form task-irrelevant PL (TIPL) (Watanabe, Nanez & Sasaki, Nature, 2001; Watanabe et al, 2002, Nature Neuroscience; Seitz & Watanabe, Nature, 2003; Seitz, Kim & Watanabe, 2009, Neuron; Shibata et al, 2012, Science). These results suggest that PL occurs as a result of interactions between reinforcement and bottom-up stimulus signals (Seitz & Watanabe, 2005, TICS). On the other hand, fMRI study results indicate that lateral prefrontal cortex fails to detect and thus to suppress subthreshold task-irrelevant signals. This leads to the paradoxical effect that a signal that is below, but close to, one’s discrimination threshold ends up being stronger than suprathreshold signals (Tsushima, Ssasaki & Watanabe, 2006, Science).  We confirmed this mechanism by showing that task-irrelevant learning occurs only when a presented feature is under and close to the threshold (Tsushima et al,2009, Current Biol). From all of these results, we conclude that attention and reward play important but different roles in PL.