In the literature, short- and long-term training were found to give rise to different degrees of specificity. For example, in an orientation discrimination task, Jeter, Dosher, Liu, and Lu (
2010) found that long-term training tended to lead to specificity, whereas short-term learning tended to lead to substantial transfer. According to the reverse hierarchy theory (Ahissar and Hochstein,
1997), long-term training that reaches the very limits of performance involves earlier and hence more specialized cortical areas than short-term learning that may involve higher cortical areas that allow transfer. Hence, long-term learning may be more specific than the short-term learning tested by J. Y. Zhang and Yang (
2014).
The aim of the current study was to first replicate the original J. Y. Zhang and Yang (
2014) study and then to investigate whether the complete transfer would hold for longer-term training. To our surprise, we could not even replicate the original result in J. Y. Zhang and Yang (
2014) with the first seven sessions of data, despite our effort to replicate the experiment as faithfully as possible and in two laboratories. Because we could not find complete transfer in the shorter-term learning, our argument for examining specificity in the longer-term learning was weakened, unfortunately.
The discrepancy of the results between our study and J. Y. Zhang and Yang (
2014) raises the question of variability of data (in other words, individual difference) even in short-term learning, in addition to the short- versus long-term training. As far as we could tell, the main difference in methods between our experiments and that in J. Y. Zhang and Yang (
2014) was the luminance of the dots, because this information was unavailable from J. Y. Zhang and Yang (
2014) after our repeated requests. However, we are doubtful that this difference is responsible for the very different results between the two studies. We wonder if large individual differences, which had been typical in our past studies in motion perceptual learning, were responsible for the different results. Indeed, even in J. Y. Zhang and Yang (
2014)'s experiment 1 in which the two tasks were run consecutively rather than in parallel, two of the six participants did not show the transfer effect and were regarded as outliers. In both J. Y. Zhang and Yang (
2014)'s experiment 2 and our
Experiment 1, each experiment had only six participants. This small sample size is another possible source of the discrepancies between the two studies. In the literature, Fahle and Henke-Fahle (
1996) found that participants varied widely in their pretraining performance, in the amount of learning they could accomplish, and in the speed with which they could accomplish the improvement (see also Astle, Li, Webb, Levi, & McGraw,
2013).
We also noticed that, prior to the J. Y. Zhang and Yang (
2014) study in motion discrimination with foveal stimulation, all double training studies were on spatial vision with peripheral stimulation. Some of the studies had been replicated as well (Hung & Seitz,
2014). It remains unclear whether or not spatial and peripheral vision was more robust in transferring learning under the double training regime than motion direction discrimination in foveal vision.
Ultimately, resolving these differences requires additional experiments from independent laboratories.