[lingtalks] Aaron Seitz Talk, Friday Feb. 1 at 12pm

[Steven Ford]

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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