Abstract
Newborns have very limited vision and so humans have to learn to perceive. Here, we asked the question whether lifelong learning leads to general visual skills making some observers consistently superior than others in basic visual paradigms. To this end, we tested 40 healthy university students in visual acuity, vernier discrimination, visual backward masking, Gabor contrast detection, and bisection discrimination. If lifelong visual learning leads to generalized visual skills, we expect strong correlations between the paradigms. However, we found that all "interesting" pairwise correlations were non-significant, except for a positive correlation between Gabor contrast detection and visual acuity. The low correlations cannot be explained by intra-observer variability because performance within a given task was highly reproducible. In summary, our study provides evidence that everyday experience shapes perception in a very specific manner.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013