Learning to be fast: gain accuracy with speed

Our recent neurophysiological findings provided evidence for collinear facilitation in detecting low-contrast Gabor patches (GPs) and for the abolishment of these collinear interactions by backward masking (BM) (Sterkin et al., 2008; Sterkin, Yehezkel, Bonneh, et al., 2009). We suggested that the suppression induced by the BM eliminates the collinear facilitation. Moreover, our recent study showed that training on a BM task overcomes the BM effect, hence, improves the processing speed (Polat, 2009). Here we applied training on detecting a target that is followed by BM in order to study whether reinforced facilitatory interactions can overcome the suppressive effects induced by BM. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded before and after ten training sessions performed on different days. Low-contrast, foveal target GP was simultaneously flanked by two collinear high-contrast GPs. In the BM task, another identical mask was presented at different time-intervals (ISIs). Before training, BM induced suppression of target detection, at the ISI of 50 ms, in agreement with earlier behavioral findings. This ISI coincides with the active time-window of lateral interactions. After training, our results show a remarkable improvement in all behavioral measurements, including percent of correct responses, sensitivity (d'), reaction time (RT) and the decision criterion for this ISI. The ERP results show that before training,BM attenuated the physiological markers of facilitation at the same ISI of 50 ms, measured as the amplitude of the negative N1 peak (latency of 260 ms). After the training, the sensory representation, reflected by P1 peak, has not changed, consistent with the unchanged physical parameters of the stimulus. Instead, the shorter latency (by 20 ms, latency of 240 ms) and the increased amplitude of N1 represent the development of faster and stronger facilitatory lateral interactions between the target and the collinear flankers. Thus, previously effective backward masking became ineffective in disrupting the collinear facilitation. Moreover, a high-amplitude late peak (P4, latency of 610-630 ms) was not affected by training, however its high correlation with RT (95%) before training was significantly decreased (to 76%), consistent with a lower-level representation of a trained skill. We suggest that perceptual learning that strengthens collinear facilitation results in a faster processing speed.