Differences in the time course of learning for hard compared to easy training

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Neuroscience
• Perceptual learning

Background:

• Behavioral improvement in perceptual tasks often follows training with either difficult or easy stimuli.
• The underlying learning mechanisms for hard versus easy training remain poorly understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the time course and characteristics of perceptual learning after hard versus easy training.
• To compare behavioral improvement and transfer performance between hard and easy training conditions.

Main Methods:

• Observers discriminated global form patterns after either hard training (highly similar stimuli) or easy training (highly discriminable stimuli).
• The time course of learning was assessed within and across training sessions.

Main Results:

• Hard training yielded significantly greater behavioral improvement compared to easy training.
• Performance improved within single sessions for hard training, but only across sessions for easy training.
• Differences in learning and transfer performance were observed between the two training conditions.

Conclusions:

• Training with difficult stimuli may promote rapid, online learning of specific features.
• Easy training appears to involve consolidation of learning that transfers to less discriminable stimuli over longer periods.