Perceptual learning and access to consciousness

VERONICA PEREZ SCHUSTER; DIEGO E. SHALÓM; MARIANO SIGMAN

Punta del este

Conferencia; Medyfinol Conference; 2008

Medyfinol

Perceptual learning can produce changes in: discriminability, speed of recognition, or pop-out effect of a form. We study the effect of perceptual learning in the accessibility of consciousness. With that purpose we train a group of people where each subject is extensively trained in a visual search of an isosceles triangle chosen randomly among 4 possible orientations (up, down, left or right). The visual search task involves finding the target within an array of distracters (triangles in the others three orientations). Subjects perform training sessions of the search task until they reach a stable performance above 80%. Once training is completed the shape trained immediately attracts the attention in the visual search task, like it was more brilliant or a different color that the other shapes. To study the accessibility of the trained and untrained shapes to consciousness as well as the accessibility to form information in the unconscious regime we make masking and attentional blink experiments. In the masking experiment we found that the information can be reported in the unconscious regime while in the attentional blink experiment there are changes in the accessibility of consciousness.