Week 3-Learning Behind Expertise

Have you ever wondered how some textile workers are so good at distinguishing between cloth materials? Yeah, you got it right- Experience, but what happens with experience? Every day they get exposed to the materials they are working on and eventually become an expert in distinguishing. This phenomenon is called perceptual learning or mere exposure learning. We can observe this phenomenon in any field; the person most exposed to music can identify pitch differences more than someone who listens to songs once in a while. If we go further when we go grocery shopping, in the case of fruits, the shopkeeper always seems to know which one is the better

one. Simply put, we can say learning without explicit training (Gluck et al., 2008).

Perceptual learning is, in a way, similar to priming. Let’s see what priming is. Priming is how earlier exposure to a stimulus leads to familiarity with that particular stimulus. A prominent feature of this phenomenon is that the subject doesn’t have to be aware of the exposure to stimuli to sense familiarity. Similarly, in perceptual learning, the learner doesn’t have to be aware of the change in their perception or learning of that particular stimulus. But the question to be discussed is, can habituation be the reason behind perceptual learning? In the previous post, we discussed habituation and how repeated exposure can lead to habituation of stimuli. In the case of perceptual learning, the learning takes place with repeated exposure. After going to the neural basis of habituation and sensitization, we will answer this question.

References

Gluck, M. A., Mercado, E., & Myers, C. E. (2008). Learning and memory: From brain to behavior. Worth Publishers.