Abstract
The present study examined the role of two types of attention in task relevant visual perceptual learning (TR-VPL): exogenous and endogenous attention. VPL performance was assessed by examining the magnitude of learning to a trained stimulus and transfer of learning to an untrained stimulus. To assess the differential role of attention in VPL, two types of attentional cues were manipulated; endogenous and exogenous. In order to assess the effectiveness of the attentional cue, the two types of attentional cues were further divided into two cue-validity conditions (100% valid, 80% valid). Participants were to discriminate between complex and simple gabors embedded in fixed additive Gaussian noise while contrast of the complex gabor was varied. It was found that for trained stimuli, both endogenous and exogenous attention facilitate TR-VPL as reflected by improved performance from pre-test to post-test. Transfer of training was impacted by cue-validity; with transfer found for those in the 100% cue-validity conditions across both attentional cues.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018