Oxyopia Abstract

February 6, 2009
Friday, 4:00 PM
489 Minor Hall

Aaron Seitz, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside
Host: TBA

Title

The Role of Reward in Perceptual Learning

Abstract

The study of human learning is complicated by the myriad of processing elements involved in conducting any behavioral task. In the case of visual perceptual learning, there has been significant controversy regarding the task-processes that guide the formation of this learning; however, there is a developing consensus that top-down, task-related factors are required for such learning to take place. Here I present results that challenge this idea by use of a novel procedure in which human participants, who were deprived of food and water, passively viewed visual stimuli while receiving occasional drops of water as rewards. Visual orientation stimuli, which were temporally paired with the liquid-rewards, were viewed monocularly and rendered imperceptible by continuously flashing contour rich patterns to the other eye. Results show that visual learning can be formed in human adults through stimulus-reward pairing in the absence of a task and without awareness of the stimulus presentation or reward contingencies. I also discuss data from recordings taken from an array of electrodes implanted into area V4 of macaque monkeys who were trained in the same manner as the human subjects.

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