Training under attentional competition produces learned biases in visual appearance

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Selective attention can temporarily modify visual perception.
• It remains unclear if these attentional effects can be learned through sustained training.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if training attention under sensory competition leads to learned changes in perceived contrast.
• To determine if resolving attentional competition recalibrates visual information processing.

Main Methods:

• Participants underwent 7 days of orientation discrimination training with or without distractors.
• Perceived contrast was measured using psychophysical estimates before and after training.
• Judgments were replicated across formats to control for response bias.

Main Results:

• Training with distractors (sensory competition) induced an opponent shift in perceived contrast.
• The trained location required lower physical contrast, while the untrained location required higher contrast to appear equivalent.
• Training without distractors improved performance but did not alter perceived contrast.

Conclusions:

• Repeatedly resolving attentional competition recalibrates perceptual weighting, altering visual experience.
• Learned changes in perception occur due to sustained attentional training, not just performance enhancement.
• These findings highlight the dynamic nature of visual perception and attention.