[lingtalks] Aaron Seitz Talk, Friday Feb. 1 at 12pm
Steven Ford
sford at cogsci.ucsd.edu
Tue Jan 29 16:18:20 UTC 2008
The UCSD Department of Cognitive Science is pleased to announce a talk by
Aaron Seitz
Department of Psychology
Boston University
Friday, February 1, 2008 at 12pm
Cognitive Science Building, room 003
"Mechanisms of Perceptual Learning"
We are constantly learning new things as we go about our lives. In addition
to learning new facts, procedures and concepts, we are also refining our
sensory abilities. How and when these sensory modifications take place is
the focus of intense study and debate. In this talk I will present recent
findings from two lines of perceptual learning research.
I will first discuss recent advances in the processes of task-irrelevant
perceptual learning (TIPL). While sensory improvements were thought only to
occur when attention is focused on the stimuli to be learned (task-relevant
learning), recent studies demonstrate performance improvements independent
of the focus of attention (i.e. TIPL). In this talk, I will discuss
research showing that TIPL can occur through stimulus-reward pairings in
the absence of a behavior task or awareness to the learned stimuli. I will
also present
research showing that physiological correlates of this learning can be
found in Macaque V4.
In the other part of my talk, I will present new research showing that
training with a multisensory audio-visual stimulus produces enhanced visual
perceptual learning. This multisensory facilitatory effect depends upon the
featural relations between the auditory and visual stimuli; suggesting that
the benefits of multisensory training may result from low-level crossmodal
interactions. In addition to behavioral results, I will discuss preliminary
fMRI results that elucidate the neural circuitry underlying this
multisensory learning.
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