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Updated: May 15, 2025
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Asymmetric transfer between the learning of the complex stimulus.
Yangyang Du1, Hui Kou1, Huijie Liu2
1School of Management, Zunyi Medical University, Zunyi, China.
Frontiers in Neuroscience
|May 13, 2025
Summary
Visual working memory (VWM) training improves discrimination of complex stimuli like faces and houses. Learning face representations transferred to houses, but not vice versa, revealing category-specific VWM plasticity.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Visual Perception
- Human Brain Plasticity
Background:
- Perceptual learning of complex stimuli demonstrates high-level visual cortex plasticity.
- Limited understanding exists regarding the plasticity and specificity of complex stimuli representation in visual working memory (VWM).
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the plasticity and specificity of complex visual stimuli representation within VWM.
- To explore how training affects the discrimination of faces and houses in VWM.
Main Methods:
- A delayed match-to-sample task was employed to train VWM for faces (neutral, happy, sad) and houses over six days.
- Sensitivity (d') was measured to assess discrimination performance in VWM before and after training.
Main Results:
- Training significantly enhanced discrimination sensitivity in VWM for all tested stimuli.
- Learning effects for neutral faces transferred to emotional faces and vice versa, but not between different emotional faces.
- Asymmetrical transfer observed: face learning transferred to houses, but house learning did not transfer to faces.
Conclusions:
- Training induces significant improvements in VWM discrimination for complex visual stimuli.
- Distinct cognitive processes underlie training effects across different stimulus categories, indicating category-specific VWM plasticity.
- Findings provide insights into the mechanisms of VWM improvement and the specialized nature of visual representations.
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