Learning in many visual perceptual tasks has been shown to be specific to practiced stimuli, while new stimuli have to be learned from scratch. Here we demonstrate generalization using a novel paradigm in motion discrimination where learning has been previously shown to be specific. We trained subjects to discriminate directions of moving dots, and verified the previous results that learning does not transfer from a trained direction to a new one. However, by tracking the subjects' performance across time in the new direction, we found that their speed of learning doubled. Therefore, we found generalization in a task previously considered too difficult to generalize. We also replicated

The authors investigated how human adults encode and remember parts of multielement scenes composed of recursively embedded visual shape combinations. The authors found that shape combinations that are parts of larger configurations are less well remembered than shape combinations of the same kind that are not embedded. Combined with basic mechanisms of statistical learning, this embeddedness constraint enables the development of complex new features for acquiring internal representations efficiently without being computationally intractable. The resulting representations also encode parts and wholes by chunking the visual input into components according to the statistical coherence of their constituents. These results suggest that a bootstrapping approach of constrained statistical learning offers a unified framework for investigating the formation of different internal representations in pattern and scene perception.

Two experiments were conducted to determine the extent to which perceptual learning transfers between orientation and direction discrimination. Naive observers were trained to discriminate orientation differences between two single-line stimuli, and direction differences between two single-moving-dot stimuli. In the first experiment, observers practiced the orientation and direction tasks along orthogonal axes in the fronto-parallel plane. In the second experiment, a different group of observers practiced both tasks along a single axis. Perceptual learning was observed on both tasks in both experiments. Under the same-axis condition, the observers' orientation sensitivity was found to be significantly elevated after the direction training, indicating a transfer of learning from direction to orientation. There was no evidence of transfer in any other cases tested. In addition, the rate of learning on the orientation task was much higher than the rate on the direction task. The implicati...

Stimulus specificity is a typical result in perceptual learning studies --- subjects' improved performance after repeated trials under one stimulus condition A does not transfer to a different condition B. From the viewpoint of "learning statistical properties from the stimulus ensemble", subjects may have learned specific aspects of A, but since B is not a sample from the A distribution, learning therefore does not transfer from A to B. We employed a novel paradigm of an interleaved stimulus sequence A-A-B A-A-B .... Both A and B consisted of two sequential random dot motion stimuli. Subjects discriminated if the two directions in each condition were the same or different. Their performance for the B trials was higher than that for the first half of A trials, indicating a transfer A ! B, which is not predicted by a stimulus specific learning. 1 Introduction Studies in perceptual learning have largely converged to a common finding: what is being learned is stimulus specific. That i...