Visual adaptation refers to the visual system adjusting to changes in the statistics of the visual environment. Adaptation usually results in temporary biases in the perception of subsequently viewed stimuli, termed aftereffects (Thompson & Burr,
2009). For example, adaptation to an oriented stimulus induces a tilt aftereffect (TAE) in which the perceived orientation of a test stimulus appears slightly repelled away from the orientation of the adapted stimulus (Gibson & Radner,
1937). This repulsion effect is strongest for angles that are 10°–20° away from the adapting orientation (Campbell & Maffei,
1971). The TAE is primarily driven by mere exposure even when the stimulus is unattended or invisible (He & MacLeod,
2001). It was traditionally assumed to result from a bottom-up (stimulus-driven) process (De Baene & Vogels,
2010; Sekuler & Pantle,
1967), with longer adaptation causing stronger and longer lasting TAE (Magnussen & Johnsen,
1986). However, a growing body of evidence suggests that adaptation adjustments, including aftereffects, are not just automatic, but vary depending on the adapting procedure. For example, spatial attention was found to increase the magnitude of aftereffects following adaptation to a variety of features like motion (Chaudhuri,
1990) and orientation (Festman & Ahissar,
2004). Using optical distortions, it was shown that observers can “learn to adapt.” For example, with repeated adaptation on subsequent days, observers adjusted faster to a prism distortion (Yehezkel, Sagi, Sterkin, Belkin, & Polat,
2010). In accordance, four days of adaptation to an altered virtual reality, which lacked vertical information, revealed effects of days on adaptation, with different adaptation dynamics across days (Haak, Fast, Bao, Lee, & Engel,
2014). In an additional study, repeated adaptation to motion or contrast, across multiple daily sessions, induced aftereffects that were affected by previous adaptation sessions and task context (Dong, Gao, Lv, & Bao,
2016). It was recently shown that aftereffects interact with learning. Perceptual learning of texture discrimination was found to induce a TAE that was task dependent and persisted longer following training (Pinchuk-Yacobi, Harris, & Sagi,
2016).